Letter Lab

Daily word puzzle. Find the highest scoring move! Puzzle editor allows for community-created puzzles.

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Inspiration

I play a lot of scrabble with my mom, like way too much scrabble. While playing I always tend to wonder what the best possible play on the board is. I wonder if my play is good or if there was something better that I missed. That is essentially the idea behind Letter Lab. Instead of playing against another person, I wanted a daily puzzle that challenges you to find the best possible move on a board. I love both Reddit and GameMaker, so when I saw the hackathon advertised I knew I had to give it a shot.

What it does

Letter Lab is a daily word puzzle played on a grid board. Players are given a set of letters and a partially filled board. The goal is to find the single highest-scoring move. The community can also create and share puzzles via the Puzzle Editor.

How we built it

I am a solo dev who has been using GameMaker for about 4 years now. I have done many 2D style games over the years but this is my first time doing a word game. For the word bank, I used the wordnik open source wordbank. For the tiles, I purchased a cheap asset pack on itch.io. Then of course updated API endpoints on the devvit server.

Challenges we ran into

Learning devvit was a challenge but the documentation was helpful and the discord was helpful as well. I did find two bugs with the GameMaker -> Reddit export, probably because the feature is so new. I had workarounds for both though, one bug was that I couldn't export the game inline, but expanded view is fine. The other is that I couldn't call navigateTo via javascript extension. It would've been nice to immediately go to the new puzzle after you build one, but that's okay.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Proud of whipping this together in two weeks. It's amazing what can get done when you're motivated and on a roll. Also proud to build on Reddit, I've been a redditor for 9 years so it's been fun to build something on the platform for the first time.

What we learned

Learned about daily games on Devvit! Now it will easier to build additional future games.

What's next for Letter Lab

I really wanted to do "multi-move" puzzles ... puzzles with 2 or 3 moves to see if you can get the highest score. I think it would add an interesting, deeper layer to the game. But the logic gets slightly more complex and I ran out of time for the hackathon. There are also many quality-of-life updates I could make to the game.

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