LetterPaths

LetterPaths is a daily word game inspired by the frantic energy of Banagrams. Your goal is simple: connect the stars with words. Forget hunting for obscure vocabulary; here, speed is your best friend.

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Inspiration

LetterPaths is inspired by Banagrams, which is a frantic race to form crosswords. Long and clever words matter less than just building quickly and not being afraid to change your crossword mid-game. I ported this idea into a bite-sized version as a daily game.

What it does

LetterPaths is a daily game where players race to form a crossword that uses specific goal spaces on the board. After completing the game, users see a leaderboard and statistics, to see how they compared with everyone else with the exact same board and letter tiles.

This app can bring Reddit communities together by giving a small daily word challenge, with performance compared across that particular subreddit. It's accessible, everyone should be able to complete the game, but it offers a challenge for those trying for the best scores. I am eager for users to start playing, to see how I stack up!

How to Play

The player is given a hand of 15 letter tiles. The game board is a 5 x 6 grid with 5 randomly selected goal spaces. Players drag and drop their letter tiles onto the board. Once all 5 goal spaces are connected together, the game checks if all words on the game board are valid English words. If they are, then the player wins and their final time is used as their score. The goal is to get the lowest time possible.

Often, players will want more letter tiles than they started with. They can get as many extra letters as they want by using the "Buy Tile" button, but the cost is that each extra tile will add 30s to their final time.

As a daily game, this app will create one post per day with a generated configuration of goal spaces, letters in the player's hand, and the order that new letters will come out when "Buy Tile" is pressed. This information is saved in redis per post, so every player that plays a particular post will play the same configuration. The win game screen will show how that player's time compares to everyone else who has played that post's game.

How we built it

This project was built mobile-first; a lot of attention was focused on the mobile experience. It was built using Reddit's Devvit platform. React is used for the front end and Express for the server.

Challenges we ran into

  • Designing the game to be intuitive was a challenge. LetterPaths is simple, but offering just enough instruction and feedback to users was challenging.
  • Getting everything to fit on a small mobile screen was also challenging

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The game is really fun! I'm also happy with the visual design.

What we learned

Developing games for Reddit was pretty easy! I was able to leverage React, which I already know pretty well, and it worked perfectly for this game.

What's next for LetterPaths

  • Statistics screen could show a user's streaks, averages, or historical times that a user has been in top X percent.
  • Perhaps giving awards when players finish in the top X percentage of players.

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