Hard mode is how we've played all along and how I imagine most people play as I personally didn't even think of the "normal mode" as a way of playing the game, also I see no reason to allow different ways of playing when it's a game about comparing your scores with other people.
And just to reduce the code base as much as I can since I'm already extremely unfamiliar with it.
Ideally I would find a smaller list of proper, frequently used words as well to use as the solution list similar to the official app.
I was just thinking how Wordle could guarantee that it didn't have the same word as the solution again when it didn't have a backend, but then realized it's just selecting words sequentially from the word list. It's a bit crappy that you can just look in the source code and see future words, but there maybe isn't any other way to handle this when you have no backend? I guess you could easily obfuscate the words to make them not appear as plain text though at least. We'll see.
Being able to guess an infinite number of times will make it easier to see the true skill difference between people. I was able to guess today's word in 4 guesses while my friend used 3, but in reality I guessed like 20 words, they just weren't in the word list and weren't approved.
If we were able to click a box then the next letter we typed could be entered into that box.
This would allow us to easier visualize the word if we've already found some letters that are not in the first positions. This is something you can do outside the game so it should ideally be possible inside the game.
For example if the solution is HOUSE and you've found HUE then currently you can only enter HUE, which is clearly wrong and doesn't help you any. You're left to stare at the keyboard to try and see what the word could be. If you were able to enter H - U - E then it would probably be more obvious that HOUSE was a potential solution from looking at the empty spaces in the word.
But if the word is not in the word list it should be marked in some way to indicate that, just as a way to inform the user what he guessed probably isn't a real word, just as a way to learn words, I guess.
I got stuck on a hard word where I had 3 letters in the correct position, and it was almost impossible for me to find a word in the word list that included these 3 letters and 2 new letters I hadn't already used. I realize now that it's because I've been in the mindset which this game considers hard mode all the time that I could figure this out. I could have just ignored the 3 letters I already had and guess a completely different word to find the 2 last letters, but anyway I'm planning to make hard mode the default as per #2 so then this will make sense.
For example if you get a solution word like ABBEY it could give you hints like "One letter appears multiple times" and if you've found one of these instances it could say "One of the letters you've already found appears multiple (or two) times" or even "It's a double consonant" etc.
I think that could be cool. The price for a hint could be sacrificing one guess. This will tie into my infinite guesses so you're able to sacrifice as many guesses as you want if you don't value your final score.