posted by on January 12, 2025
As part of the thinky puzzle games discord, some folks began running the Confounding Calendar project, which I got to experience for the first time this past year (2024). My favorite entry from those was a game called “Alphabet Soup for Picky Eaters” which is a combination of a code-breaking word-guessing game and a bunch of absolutely delightful little guys of different colors to make use of the yearly Confounding Calendar chosen color palette. If you haven’t played it, I highly recommend doing so.
After playing it, I felt a similar feeling to how I felt when I first played Wordle. Here was a game that was a delightful 10-15 minute puzzle, it didn’t overstay its welcome, and it also happened to have a handful of solutions that could all suffice. I began imagining trying to make a version that could handle the “new word every day” and more importantly “new set of rules every day.”
This weekend, I had some free time and needed a distraction for a handful of reasons, and so I finally decided to dive into making a prototype. I’ve been building UI-heavy browser-focused games in React lately as a way to avoid having to learn the arcane and cursed UI programming behind more conventional game engines.
It took the better part of an afternoon, but I was able to set up a list of popular English words and various rules to clue them so that the game could provide a countdown and automatically choose a new word every day at midnight pacific and the rules could vary each day, as well. I aimed to have at least 5 words that appeased all the judges per day so that it’s not too difficult. I also have made sure that it plays pretty smoothly on both mobile and desktop. You can play it on my itch.io page.
After getting some feedback from friends and a few discord servers I’m in, I added the ability to write down notes as you go along, and I’ve also added a way to get hints in the form of the game telling you what kind of rule a given judge is particular about. It won’t give you all the info you need to solve the puzzle, but hopefully it’s enough to be a stepping stone towards the solution. Additionally, if you finish the game with a guess unexpectedly, you can refresh to see what the rules were that you unintentionally satisfied.
Making this game was a lot of fun, and it was a much quicker feedback loop to prototype than other games I’ve tried to make this year like Wizard Sokoban or even UI games I haven’t written about here. Here’s hoping that I’ll have more energy to throw some new ones together in the near future.