Blog du Wren

Another Word Game

What happens when you leave a computer programmer to his own devices? Well, first he watches a lot of movies. Then he recodes his blog. But soon, he feels the call of those sweet sweet algorithms, with their object orientated logic and structured syntax, and he can't handle it. He must write something.

Well, this is my something: Another Word Game. Inspired by boggle, Word Racer, and Wordy, the premise of this game struck me while lying in bed one morning. The object is to use up all the initial letters once while reusing letters as infrequently as possible. Points are awarded on length of word and number of reused squares.

To play, you need to have java installed. If you don't have it installed already, it is kind of a pain. Sorry about that. Also, it might not work on some Macs (I don't have a Mac to test it on.) Thanks to Andrew, gretch, marg, Saxtor, rus, Sara, Amanda, and Deanna for help with the testing. If you come up with any bugs, let me know. Enjoy!

Saturday March 10 2007

File under: games, coding

Toggle Comments (13)

comment?

on Sat 10th Mar, 2007 09:17 pm PST Jule said:
I relly suk at this gaim. I canot figur out why. I thenk you may hav a bug in it, caus it wont acept any whord I put in.
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on Sat 10th Mar, 2007 10:49 pm PST Sarah F said:
GEEZ!!! Who is ~the man~ anyway??? He accepted HWIG as a word but not "hee", as in 'hee hee, that was funny'. But, ~the man~ aside, one of my favorite posts since you left Asia. Nice work!
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on Sun 11th Mar, 2007 09:04 am PST Andrew said:
Hwig are you talking about?
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on Sun 11th Mar, 2007 10:28 am PST Wren said:
Sarah, the real question is what are you doing trying "HWIG"? I borrowed the dictionary (at least for the 3, 4, and 5 letter words) for Another Word Game from here. (Miriam-Webster and Dictionary.com don't like the word "hee" either)
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on Sun 11th Mar, 2007 05:04 pm PST Nesbitt said:
It seems to work on my mac, really cool. One question, why does it change the letters in the squares of words I find? Does that make sense the way I worded it? When I find a word and submit it the letters change in those squares. Maybe I'm just an idiot and it is self evident. Only other suggestion it is a cool game worthy of a more distinguished name then another word game.
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on Mon 12th Mar, 2007 12:22 am PST Horge said:
How is "doo" not a word?! But otherwise, good times, buddy. But how about naming it something cooler, like "Wren's Word Game" or "Wrenggle" or "Wrebble" or "Wrentionary". Maybe "Thesaurschultz"...
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on Mon 12th Mar, 2007 01:53 am PST Horge said:
Otherwise, any way to work in some sort of a list for the longest words found, in addition to the high scores? I've only finished it once so far, with a 14. Damn Qs and Xs...
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on Mon 12th Mar, 2007 08:53 am PST me said:
it's not working... or am i doing something wrong? how am i supposed to spend my little work breaks?
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on Mon 12th Mar, 2007 01:15 pm PST Saxtor said:
I can't speak for Wren, but as a beta tester on this, I believe that until a dictionary accommodating long words is implemented, the "Longest Words" list will likely be made up of words such as "PBBTSIQuVVNRLHSYUI." No, really, try it.
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on Mon 12th Mar, 2007 01:20 pm PST Wren said:
Dude, that was supposed to be an easter egg. Now that everyone knows, the high scores mean nothing.
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on Tue 13th Mar, 2007 12:09 am PST Horge said:
Cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater!
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on Tue 13th Mar, 2007 11:27 am PST Wren said:
Just so you know, I got my score without cheating one bit, thank you very much.

But more excitingly, I've updated the game to 1)Now spell check 6-letter words (I'll prolly never get around to 7-letter words, because there are a lot of them) and 2)Now sort the high scores correctly and display more of them, for your viewing pleasure.

To be sure you are playing the latest version, check for the version updated date in the instructions panel. If you don't have it, you can close all instance of your browser and try again, or open the java console and clear the cache (by pressing "x").
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on Tue 13th Mar, 2007 07:56 pm PST Caleb said:
I don't know what your current high score is, but I got my high score of 22 without cheating. Whew.

Also, it works fine on my Mac laptop. Cheers for that.
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