Trendle

What it does

The Google Trends and Google Ngram services allow the user to search for how the popularity of a certain phrase changed with time. Our game reverses this concept - you have to guess the secret word based on its trend graph!

How we built it

We used a Python-based backend for handling the game logic, like retrieving the popularity graph and the hint system. Frontend was built using HTML, TypeScript and JavaScript. We generated the list of possible answers using Wikipedia article titles. We use the Google Ngram API to get the graphs showing the word usage over the years. To generate hints, we built a graph of a subset of Wikipedia articles, which is used for choosing words that are close to the target word.

Challenges we ran into

Making the hint system required a lot of careful planning, and we also had to make sure that the graphs of possible answers are "interesting" enough (not just flat).