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  The Word Wizard :3

Word Wizard

Inspiration

I was inspired by Scrabble, where you use the letters that have already been put down as part of your own words. This is more of a competitive 1v1 word duel than a game like scrabble, but I also liked the idea of assigning points to each letter. Maybe in the future we can assign larger amounts of damage to longer words?

What it does

Word Wizard is a turn based word game where your goal is to trick the other person into spelling a valid word. If at any point, you think the other person isn't able to create a valid word with the current letter pool. you can also "Cast Doubt!", which will do damage to them if there are no valid words remaining.

How we built it

Originally I was considering using a game engine like Unity or a frontend framework like React Native, but given the limited timeframe of this hackathon, I opted to just write everything in raw HTML/CSS/JavaScript. All my styles are in a big style.css file, and all the game logic is inside a big file called game.js.

Challenges we ran into

One of the unexpectedly difficult parts of the project was actually getting the word list. I wanted a word list that was of good quality, comprehensive, and in an easy to parse format. In the end, I used dwyl's words_alpha.txt because of its simplicity to parse.

Another difficulty was the CSS. Word Wizards is scalable up until the size of a small tablet, which was tricky to create. A lot of heavy usage of CSS grids and light usage of flexbox made positioning the keyboard especially easy, and it also wraps around neatly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I was especially proud with how the keyboard came out, and the general functionality of the game. The log section on the right hand side also came out nicely.

What we learned

It's difficult making things alone! In previous competitions, a lot of the work was divided up among us, which made things significantly faster. I hope next time I can find a group of other people working in the Gaming track.

What's next for Word Wizard

If we had more time, we would work on finding a more comprehensive word list, possibly add in variable damage for different letters, clean up the graphics, and add scaling for mobile devices.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript