A couple of weeks ago, my friends and I built a word game during a hackathon and got a great reception from people who played it. Previous HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3750068
My friends have cleaned up a lot of the UI and the code, and have published it under a new name. It uses now.js in the backend, and is all html5/js. Let me know what you think!
The game works well on mobile devices too. iPad has the best experience :)
Good work. You fixed my biggest complaint with the last version (not disabling default backspace behaviour). The "Or just use your name" option is something I really appreciate. I almost left when I didn't see it at first, so you may want to consider making it a little more obvious.
The English language really has a delightful amount of three-letter words. I don't know all of them, but guessing gives me a high chance it actually exists.
One issue: Sometimes I want to start with some letter, but the game only marks the second letter, rendering the selection incorrect. Might be due to my computer being busy with some simulations though.
If you're typing and hit the enter key it should start fresh so the first letter will be accepted.
I think what's happening is you're typing in a few letters of one word, then moving on to the next word with a new letter that's not adjacent to the previous ones. Typing a letter that's not adjacent causes the word to fail, and that letter won't be part of the next word. So if we had a 3x3 board
A B C
D E F
G H I
And I typed ABC GHI, it would only count HI since G was part of the failing word ABCG.
This is how it's supposed to work, but it can get a little trippy some times. If what I explained is not what's happening, and it's just not picking up the first letter in a normal case, let me know!
Basically yes. It feels like lag. I click on the first letter and drag, but only a later letter (not neccessarily the first, sometimes also the second) gets highlighted. The simulation has ended now, so apparently it wasn't due to my CPU being maxed out.
This is awesome and really pretty addictive. Although I was able to type and drag the cursor around randomly and pick up little words like 'pe' or 'th' it almost seemed like a stupid exploit. And another thing is the after game stats are really pretty interesting, if there was a way to view them longer than ten seconds that would be great!
As a Scramble with Friends addict this is clearly up my ally. I actually find the mouse to be faster because the keyboard is too unpredictable and it's too disruptive to completing a word. There must be something there since I was consistently getting the top score.
Really super buggy...using Chrome on Mac 10.7...letters get stuck all the time, sometimes keys don't register...needs work, but looks like an addictive concept, if I could make it through one round without it misregistering my keystrokes...
For what it's worth, I'm using Chrome on OS 10.7 and it works flawlessly.
He might be unaware that letters need to be inline. I ran into that at first when I thought I could use any of the letters on the board whether they were adjacent or not. Once I learned the mechanics, it stopped 'acting buggy'.
Great game! Although there was a problem with the leaderboard. A couple of times the leaderboard showed up only for a fraction of a second and then disappeared. I'm assuming it took too long to load and by that time the next round started.
Glad you like it! We're doing our best to prevent cheating, but it's certainly not impossible to cheat. If it becomes a problem we'll definitely address it. As for the current scores, I don't believe they are cheating. I've been able to get 310 after playing quite a bit, and I certainly know there are people out there better than me.
New games start 10 seconds after the leaderboard first shows and we pretty much have to hide the leaderboard right then and there. Since it's all real-time against the world, every game runs at the same time, so there's no real choosing when to start a new one.
By installed, it just means it's added to your 'library' on clay.io. That way once we have more than 3 games, it will be easy to find the games you have played before and like.
Were you able to play on other browsers? We have been told that happens on some Android devices as well. We are looking into it right :/ Thanks for pointing it out!
The game works well on mobile devices too. iPad has the best experience :)