Slyde

Inspiration

My goal for this game was to make it engrossing, open-ended and community-driven. For some time I have been drawn to the idea of sliding blocks of letters around, because while my favorite kind of games are word games, I also like the tactile enjoyment of interlocking puzzles and rubik's cubes. Combining the two was both an inspiration and a curiosity.

What it does

Slyde is a daily challenge where everyone starts with the same configuration of two-letter dominos on a board. You have to "slyde" tiles around with a simple goal - make the longest, highest point word you can make. That's your 'slyde of the day'. There are leaderboards so you can see where your slyde ranks among others, and you can always also come back and try to outdo your best score, whether in the same puzzle, or another puzzle the next day. Oh, and you get 3 flips in every game, wherein you can reverse the order of letters in a domino. Sometimes you just need that letter order flipped!

How we built it

The game is made with GameMaker and Devvit platform. I picked up GameMaker for this challenge and it really let me keep the codebase simple and sorted (both mentally and visually) so I could focus my energy where it mattered most. I crunched a lot of word data to figure out optimal bigrams of letters that would make for interesting board configurations, as well as tested with different configurations of board size, domino density and scoring ideas. New boards can be generated daily with a Devvit scheduler. I hope Slyde will make it into other puzzle lovers' daily game rotation.

See you on the flip slyde!

Built With

• love