itch.io

Interesting to see your UI considerations along the way! Yeah, when I was playing your game it was pretty clear what order the letters were in and what words they formed, so I guess I took for granted how intuitive something like that would be for a player haha. I thought about doing something similar with the UI, with having a space on the right side where a list of words you entered would pop up so you could see it in a more readable horizontal format. I still want to do a word history mechanic, but now I think I would keep it as a smaller loop inside the bigger one - the player would probably be less confused if they could see the loop formatted the same way they solved it.

The list of words thing was such a pain lol. I think I might have seen the same GitHub repo, but given that I was under such little time and I was losing sleep, I didn't want to bother spending time going through thousands of words and removing inappropriate ones, so I had to just stick with something small (searching for that itself took like an hour). Wrote a Python script to extract all the words, take any word between 3 and 7 letters, and sort them by the first and last letter (i.e. "ad" : ["and", "ampersand"]), then dumped that in a JSON. The algorithm to find a few words that loop back around to each other had to backtrack, so I thought it would find itself in an instance where it would take a few seconds to find a valid loop especially with such a limited amount of words, but thankfully it seems to work fairly quickly.