I love word games, and I’ve wasted a lot of time playing them over the years. This is my attempt to create one that I haven’t seen before, though it shares a lot of traits with many of the others.
The gameplay is simple – letter tiles fall from the top of the screen, and the player has to make words out of them before they hit the bottom.
And it works! Which kind of amazes me. Still definitely unpolished,very clunky in certain areas (especially the buttons and the timing of the animations) but it does basically what I set out to have it do, and I’m pretty happy just with that.
My hope is to keep working on it and really make it fun to play. Part of what frustrates me about other word games is that they treat words as just strings against which to check the validity of an answer. I hope (and this is something I really haven’t scratched yet) to imbue some sense of the words’ poetics, or at least their meanings – give quotes using interesting words, extra points for particularly cool ones… I have lots of ideas, none of which I’m sure of yet.
And I would also love to build more word games and make a site that offers a variety, for solo and/or social play.
For now, though, I think the next steps are to improve the aesthetics, add level characteristics, have people play it and give feedback, and generally just evolve it in as interesting a way as I can manage.
It’s also kind of a dancing hippo, code-wise – it works, but I’m nearly certain there’s a more elegant way to do everything. That’s something I’d also like to clean up.