Post by RondeSC in Word Game comments

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Would you consider adding these features:

1. ability to set the focus for entering letters out of order. This would improve playability as you could construct in-progress words with blanks in them.

2. Only allowing entry of valid words for 6-8 letter games

3. For 7&8 letter word games, provide two 'hint' like options. A one-time checkbox allowing entry of a 'combo-word' combination of two valid words ( e.g. DOGHELP) and a check box to allow jumbled letters, one time (e.g. WYBFGHU).
You may want to credit them with a less 'win' if a help option is used.

Screen Smith3 years ago

- 1 is a good idea I'll implement that

- I didn't do 2 because as you start going past 5 letters there are thousands of possible words and I have to store those somewhere. I couldn't find a comprehensive list for 6-8 so I just copied the 500+ most common 6-8 letter words and used those for keys. If I could find a list I was happy with I'd do it.

- the combo word thing has the potential to be very laggy and inefficient. I might try implementing it if I can find good lists for the 6-8 letter words. Its just easier for me to allow jumbled invalid entries. The 6-8 words were a bit of an afterthought tbh

RondeSC3 years ago (1 edit)

Combos: if for this you make the min. word length 3, you only have to check for possible 3,4&5 letter words. starting with the first 3 chars, if its a valid word you check if the remained is a valid word, else advance to checking for a first word of 1 more char length. If you also allow it for 6 letter words the combo can only be two 3 letter words.

RondeSC3 years ago

re Checking 6-8 letter words as valid: Check with 'BOGGLE' implementers. They have to check for valid words 3-8 letters long. They may have simple word lists.
There may also be a free simple REST service somewhere which will tell you if a word is spelled right.
I did find that 'https://www.thefreedictionary.com/dox' will return "<meta http-equiv="STATUS-CODE" content="404">" in the <head> where as ".../dog/" will not.

RondeSC3 years ago

BTW, My reasoning for the one time 'hint' entries for long words (when they are normally being validity checked) is the combination of there being fewer of them to chose from, and harder to come up with having the letters in them you're interested in; making it Much Harder and frustrated to deduce the correct word. Yet it is too easy without any word validity checking.

RondeSC3 years ago (1 edit)

Oh yeah, I would remove word length games for 1-3 letters, as unviable games.

itch.io

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