Unscramble Game

An app to create Unscramble game with words tailored to your own community! You can input a set of words related to your community, along with a title and time limit to solve the words.

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Inspiration

This Unscramble game is inspired by the classic Jumble game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumble), and intends to make it more fun and engaging by utilizing real-time features that allow anyone in the subreddit to take part in the same word puzzle. It intends to give flexibility of choosing your own set of words and make a fun game for your community. The game also adds a twist to classic game by giving option to jumble more than one word together, which makes it much more challenging to solve.

What it does

This app lets you create Unscramble Game tailored to your own community! You can input a set of words related to your community, along with a title and time-limit to solve the word(s) [For example: A subreddit of a TV show may choose to use character names of the show, a subreddit for a programming language may choose to use keywords of programming for the game etc.]. The app would then present scrambled letters from your chosen set of words. You can choose to scramble/jumble one word(easy), or two words(hard). Users can solve the word by tapping/clicking on the letters to select, and click on submit after the word is completed. New set of scrambled letters are presented after solving word(s), or after the timeout. All community members are presented with the same set of letters in real-time, and anybody in the subreddit can solve them. The game also features a feed for game activity - which is updated as and when the participants solve the words, and provides with hints to solve word when no players has solved by half-time for the set. After the timeout, answer will be shown for previous set and a new set of letters are presented for the players.

How we built it

The game is built using the Devvit platform(which includes CLI, AskAI tool, Play etc) and VS Code as the primary editor for building. The app primarily makes us of Blocks, and makes use multiple capabilities of Devvit platform - namely: Redis, Forms, Scheduler, Triggers, Realtime, Webviews and Menu Actions.

Challenges we ran into

Some small challenges we ran into during the development:

  1. The game makes use of scheduler for generating words to solve periodically. There were challenges with implementing this since the tasks were not firing at exact intervals. We had to try debugging the issue with this, but it appears to be a platform specific problem as of now as it is still in beta stage. The count-down timer included in the game does not indicate the exact time as of now due to this.
  2. The game makes use of webviews feature in devvit, which is still in experimental stage. So there were a number of issues to get it to work smoothly across different browsers and iOS app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Built this game using Typescript, which is quite new to me - I was mostly familiar with client-side Javascript.
  2. Making a simple game which users can take part in quickly - by solving a single word, or spend more time solving multiple words if they like to.

What we learned

At first, the idea seemed quite easy to execute. But I realized that even for building a small game like this, it takes quite a bit of effort. I've also come to realize the amazing potential of Devvit platform, which lets us build once, and have it work across multiple platforms, and make it available to any community on reddit to make use of the app.

What's next for Unscramble Game

New features are planned which would make use of the user-generated content(from posts and comments) for the app to automatically make Unscramble Game post periodically in the subreddit (through use AI tooling/external APIs).

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