Massive multiplayer online scrabble (nodeko entry) | Hacker News Reader

Massive multiplayer online scrabble (nodeko entry)

scrabb.ly

32 pointsropiku25 comments

Hmm, "You must build off of words you've played yourself (the dark tiles on the board) after your first turn."

So if I put my first word cleverly in one of the denser places of the board, I am basically screwed (well, only until I start a new game)? Just disappointing after I searched the board for quite a while to place my second word, only to get that message. Also, I have no idea where to find my first word (I know it will appear darker, but I have no idea where in the 2D space.

Yeah it's a good point. We thought about it a lot, and found that the games simply never ended if we let you go everywhere. But up to the last minute, it was still hotly debated.

All awesome feedback, look for it in v2!

PS: Heroku just crashed on us.

I put down my first word and then scrolled far, far away. Then realized that the rule and I was lost.

Yes, I had the same problem. I thought maybe the '+' button would take me back to my last tile played but.. it didn't so now I can't find it again :(

Hah. Yeah, I really wanted to fix that but we completely ran out of time at the end. This project was crazy ambitious for 48hrs, I'm just amazed we got anything to work at all! :-)

When you place words, the history shows up on the right. Once the judging is over, I'll make it so when you click on a word in the sidebar, it scrolls the board over to that word. Should help people like me who are always getting lost within the infinite scrabble space.

In the meantime, you can just click "Swap Tiles" a few times to end the game and start anew.

Looks like the leader board got hacked:

    Leaderboard

    1.FAIL -80085
    2.@dacort 2
    3.@aviel 1337
    4.@ggoodale 1337
    5.@railsjedi 1337

nope. we didnt quite get it working so we poked fun at ourselves :-)

I see. Well, I'm having a lot of fun with your app. Annexing other words by augmenting them almost makes it feel like a game of conquest. It would be fun if other people could steal "territory" from you by completing your words.

Notice those twitter names are of the developers

This is very cool! It's addictive to keep adding words.

If you start at the edge and build outwards, it seems pretty easy to go on indefinitely, continuing to add on points without even thinking of particularly high-scoring words. Maybe there should be a clearer goal? Get a high average score in addition to a high total? Get a high score using up all of the tiles in a normal scrabble set?

I think games shouldn't ever have to end. Once we get the leaderboard working again, it'll be a competition who can have the longest, largest, and most ridiculous never ending game of scrabble.

App crashed

This application is temporarily offline.

If you're the administrator of this app, please check your heroku logs for the backtrace.

Yeah, Heroku's node hosting has got some issues at the moment (its still in beta). I have to manually restart it whenever that happens :-(

Insanely addicting. I'm building out my own little peninsula of words.

Needs a minimap to get around.

Very high on our list of post-competition features. Not just for the usability; we also think the game board would make an gigantic, amazing poster. ;)

It crashed while I was playing, and then it came back, and remembered my game when it came back!

If it's a shared multiplayer persistent board, there is no "your game".

Ah, I see what you mean. I guess I was impressed that my game state was perfectly restored... current letter times, score, and ability to add to my prior words.

Actually, we do track your game state along with everyone else's. Thanks for playing!

Getting 2 double word score tiles doesn't seem to work.

Heh. That was from my misunderstanding of the rules of that, er, other tile-based word game. I'll fix it post-competition when we can deploy changes to the app. Thanks for playing!

I want a Home button because I lost my words!

that's a really cool application! I've too have been working on a multiplayer application, hope to release soon.

nicely done! what are you using for persistence on the backend?

MongoDB + geospacial indexing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com