LexiBoom

3D word puzzle set inside a rotating cube. Find the hidden words and blow up the rest to clear the noise.

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Inspiration

As a full time game developer games as "Wordle", "Find the videogame by screen" and others daily games was a kind of game that I was pending to attack. This hackaton allowed me to explore this kind of game and propose something special and different.

During development and prototype exploration Minesweeper vibes started to apper as we tried to explode tiles and lose if you explode one that belongs to a word to find. This made the game much more attractive

What it does

Is a 3D word search where you have to find certain words inside a cubes grid. You can view inside of the grid as the words can be on any direction, even diagonal. You can also explode single tiles, lines of tiles or all the tiles that shares the same letter as the selected one.

Just rotate dragging and select letters. The first one selected acts as pivot and when selected only show visible the tiles that can be connected with it, all rows, columns and diagonals. If you select the first letter and the last of a word to find, you will paint it and those tiles wont be destroyable.

How we built it

We built it using Typescript and Three.js. We were going to use Unity3D as our expertise is on that technology, but we used this project to learn new technologies and experiment with some AIs on the market.

Challenges we ran into

When the grid scales up, the count of tiles became too much and the FPS fell down very quickly, after some workarounds, refactoring and optimization we ended with stable 60 FPS with a 12x12x12 grid. And I think that we could try even bigger in the future.

We needed more time to implement more features we had in mind like some premium modes, more persistant data and the possibility to create the word search from the day more important news. This feature didn't work because of external connections. We decided to stop that feature to improve others but this might be implemented on next versions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • The game is funnier than we thought at the beggining.
  • We have improved our skills on Three.js.
  • Its a solid game that we can keep working on it on as our playtesters seems to have enjoyed it
  • We have tried some AIs as tools to learn its use on some project

What we learned

  • We learned a lot about Three.js and Typescript, that was not our main technology so as a software engineer is always a good new to learn new technologies
  • Work with Devvit and work directly on Reddit was very interesting, we will probably create another experience for Reddit in the future

What's next for LexiBoom

  • Add the features that got pending on the TODO
  • Add premium mode with some payment to unlock content
  • Add User generated content so the user can create their own grid with own words and share with friends
  • Add more languages to reach more people
  • Improve persistent data
  • Create a dedicated website for it and think about add some ads

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