Show HN: Wordit – Change One Letter, Keep the Chain Going

(victorribeiro.com)

43 points | by atum47 4 days ago

18 comments

  • tty456 2 days ago
    Love the concept! Although found it a bit leading of easy answers once I landed on a word where changing the first letter yielded many new words (i.e. word like 'time' yielded many new *ime words, or plural words if ending in an s). Felt repetitive after a while. Perhaps a Hard mode where the next changed letter must be a different position?
    • quuxplusone 2 days ago
      +1. It felt very mechanical running through "bard, card, hard, lard, nard, pard, sard, ward, ware, care, dare, fare, hare, mare, nare, pare, tare, bare, bark, dark, hark, lark, mark, nark, park, sark,..." Definitely feels like something a computer could do better than a human. (And the leaderboard confirms it.)

      But switching the traversal order to "bard, bare, care, card, hard, hare, dare, dark, hark, hart, cart,..." doesn't seem to make it any more fun.

      My suggestion would be to add an "enemy AI" following its own trajectory toward you; your job then is not just to walk around as long as possible, but to stay at least one step ahead of the enemy for a long as possible.

      The enemy might not move just one step per turn; it might do something like "stand still for 3 turns, then change 2 letters in a single turn."

      Showing the enemy's words to the player would also increase the "discoverability" of paths in the game. The player could say "Oh, apparently NARD is a valid word! I'll remember that for next time."

      • atum47 2 days ago
        thanks, the whole thing were prototyped in a day or so. I was thinking about ways to make it more challenging, maybe using 5 letters word, 6... messing with how many edits you get.

        I was going under surgery on the day I released this, cause it was my first time going under general anesthesia and i was freaking out. it was a rush against the time to release as is. now that I'm recovering i'll work on it some more.

        thanks for the feed back

      • JeelVankhede 1 day ago
        Wow! amazing concept! I couldn't score much for the very first time but I kept going again and again. Good way to find out how many words one can construct.

        Some ideas if you are planning to enhance this: - Add some hard modes - Add timer based challenges - Play with friends etc.

        Let me know if you need help in collaborating, I can help out on any coding tasks if you want to take this project to the next level. Peace! :)

        • asimovDev 2 days ago
          Is 'ment' a word? I had 'went' and wrote 'ment' on a whim and it accepted it and I was quite surprised.

          https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ment

          according to Merriam-Webster it's only a suffix

        • saulpw 2 days ago
          I played Poople for a few months, same concept but with an actual goal achievable in a few minutes.

          https://poople.com/

        • atum47 1 day ago
          Can paxcodex write a few words on how he got a score of 6472? I'm recovering from surgery and it is hard for me to do anything now, even type.
          • hasudon7171 1 day ago
            That's interesting.My native language is not English, so I can study English words throught this site
            • uberex 3 days ago
              This sort of thing was a favourite in puzzle books except you had to get to the end word.

              Fun play!

              I soon realized get to a nice word where the first letter can be replaced alot like "buck".

              • atum47 3 days ago
                After the initial prototype, I was playing to see if the game was fun, I realized that from time to time you can get a whole new word by changing one letter. I'm glad you liked it
              • vova_hn2 2 days ago
                I wish it would show the whole chain in the end, perhaps augmented with dictionary meanings or links to Wiktionary.
              • nathan03 1 day ago
                "liam" isn't in the dictionary?
                • tim-projects 2 days ago
                  LARP wasn't in the dictionary. I feel cheated.
                  • atum47 2 days ago
                    don't blame me, I used the biggest dictionary I could find
                  • Reminds me of wordle , fun concept!
                    • omeysalvi 2 days ago
                      Nice very entertaining
                      • nosioptar 2 days ago
                        The keyboard control on mobile is tedious. Have to tap in letter box to get keyboard, keyboard disappears after entering letter, have to repeat for each letter. It'd be a huge improvement to let me type all four letters without exiling my keyboard to mordor.
                        • atum47 2 days ago
                          You're not supposed to type more than one letter. You click the box you want to edit, type the letter you want to change and click check.
                          • shmeeed 2 days ago
                            FF on Android: my keyboard doesn't auti-hide and covers the check button, I need to hide it manually each time.
                            • nosioptar 2 days ago
                              Oh, that makes more sense.
                          • mgianluc 2 days ago
                            love it
                          • naikrovek 2 days ago
                            “bapt” was my starting word.

                            I was doomed to fail. “bapt” are you kidding?

                            • rothos 2 days ago
                              rapt, rape, rare, dare, ...
                              • naikrovek 2 days ago
                                "rapt" dammit. oh well. me and words are not on friendly terms. never have been.
                          • raullu 3 days ago
                            [flagged]
                            • JDK111 2 days ago
                              [dead]
                              • vladsiu 2 days ago
                                [dead]