WORD WIND

Inspiration

As for most people over the past couple weeks, my friends and I have been obsessed with WORDLE. I think the best part about it is limiting you to one puzzle a day. In a world were quick gratification is in abundance, WORDLE is so simple. We took qualities from WORDLE and Scrabble to make a game we would want to play with our friends.

What it does

A web game that gives you a set of letters randomly generated letters and urges you to use all of them to create words. The words must be contiguous (formed off of other words you've created), and you are urged to use as many tiles as possible. The randomly generated letters all can be used towards an optimal solution that is calculated on the backend. Just like WORDLE, everyone receives the same set of letters.

How we built it

With two members on our team, we split up the project into frontend and backend. Using Reactjs, we built a drag and drop functionality similar to scrabble. We save the game state into local storage, so the user doesn't have to worry about loosing their days progress. I say day because every 24 hours a brand new game state is created with new letters.

Challenges we ran into

Most of the challenges we ran into revolved around Reactjs. The package we used for drag and drop was quite confusing and took several hours of trial and error to get it to work. As for the backend, it was very important that we check the users submission against valid english words as well as generating the days letters using real words. This proved to be challenging but we think we found quite an elegant solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is our first hackathon where we've created a viable final product. The game works according to our expectations and has support for mobile and desktop alike. We encountered everything from algorithm's and data structures problems when calculating optimal solutions with given words, to CSS problems when perfecting the UI.

What we learned

How to accurately gauge what we can do given a certain time-frame. In previous hackathons, our projects were far too large scale. This is the first one where we have a working product.