WordCity

• 

  Build a city, word for word

Inspiration

Playing the NYT word games, that offer you a little daily puzzle, is really fun. I wanted to capture that feeling, but approach it from more of a video game angle and so I came up with a Scrabble x SimCity concept.

What it does

You build a city, word by word. You get a bunch of letters, just like in Scrabble. And the words you create transform into buildings for you budding city. Once you got the city running you can focus on optimizing the composition of it - balancing the different types of buildings will make your residents happy and the population numbers flourish.

How we built it

The game is built on a Devvit Webview template. The webview consists of just an HTML5 canvas, that runs the game I exported from the GameMaker engine. Communication is handled through a JS extension, so that I can access data inside the GML code in the GameMaker project.

Challenges we ran into

After a small headache of getting the project to run initially (it was mostly just me not understanding the Devvit template setup), it worked surprisingly well. Running an HTML5 canvas inside the web view allowed me to work with a fully fledged game engine and all the tools I already knew.

The main challenge was time - work outside of the hackathon has of course priority - and that really created some crunch with trying to get a playable and pretty version ready in time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting this unique concept to work and having everything ready in time (even though the development is far from finished of course)!

What we learned

The Webview feature is incredibly powerful, giving access to game engines. Great stuff!

What's next for WordCity

Quality of life features and further reddit integration (leaderboards, I'm looking at you!).

Built With

• devvit
• gamemaker
• webview