Crosswords on stream

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  Game

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  Landing page

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  Stream setup

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  Pre-game

Inspiration

Inspired by popular games streamers run while they're AFK like Contexto on Stream or Words on stream, I wanted to create a fun yet easy to play game that rewards participation, without requiring extensive setup by the streamer

What it does

Every round, a random word of at least 6 characters is chosen from an English word set, which is shuffled to form an anagram. We then dynamically build a crossword consisting of words made up of those anagrams and visually present it on screen. People in chat type in anagrams they find and correct guesses show up on stream. Every correct guess earns the chatter points and there's a leaderboard for most points. After every round, a new word is chosen with a randomly generated crossword and so the game continues until the streamer decides to end.

How we built it

I used Codex first to explore the initial prototype. I gave it a rough description of what I wanted, and instructed it to use the public twitch IRC API for chat, as well as fetch a public word list. To begin with, I used 3 curated anagrams for testing with a very basic UI. Once the core logic was there, I also used Codex to draft up multiple potential designs. I wasn't happy with those, so I instructed it to design a pixel graphics design, which was then refined until the design on the final project. After lots of polishing, I added the proper generation of random words and crosswords for each round, with the length of the longest words increasing as you get further into the game. Finally, we generated sounds to complete the experience.

Challenges we ran into

• Making sure the word list was complete and empty of any inappropriate words
• Codex struggled with recreating the initial pixel art mockup entirely in code

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• The final result looks graphically very pleasing
• It improves on several pain points people mention about games like Words on stream, like the game completely failing if not enough chatters are in stream, and words that people didn't guess not being revealed after each round
• Installing the browser source is really simple, you can just drag it into OBS, no need to manually create anything
• The current version is completely local and static, there's no server component or backend required

What we learned

• Codex is really good at creating pixel art if prompted correctly
• The twitch IRC protocol is super easy to implement

What's next for Crossword on stream

• I'd love to see it played by more people on Twitch!

Built With

• cloudflare
• irc
• javascript
• oauth
• websockets