Show HN: Tetris with words – I created this small game, please give feedback | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Tetris with words – I created this small game, please give feedback

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40 pointsabvishek58 comments

I noticed the game feels pretty hard because of the letter distribution, if you want to make it easier you might try using the english distribution, which can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency#Relative_freq...

For those curious the rough differences (in game - in english, out of 100) are:

e: -4.7 t: -2.5 c: 2.4 h: -2.3 p: 2.3 u: 1.9 b: 1.6 m: 1.6 l: 1.5 g: 1.4 r: 1.4 k: 1 x: 1 z: 0.8 o: -0.7 n: -0.6 f: 0.5 j: 0.5 v: 0.5 y: 0.5 d: 0.4 a: -0.3 q: 0.2 s: -0.2 w: 0.2 i: 0.1

edit: this might go too far towards making it easy, but you could also try and group common pairs of letter near each other.

Actually I tried to implement same. check code here

https://github.com/AbhishekCode/word-tetris/blob/master/src/...

I guess my implementation is still not perfect. I looking for ways to improved this. Thanks for pointing this out.

You could try giving a choice of two or three letters that the user selects to make it a bit easier to form words. Or the block could cycle between several letters as it drops and the letter gets decided when it hits the bottom (maybe some blocks could do this?).. maybe wildcard letters too? And it would be fun to turn up the fall velocity on more common letters!

It would also be neat to score words with less common letters higher like scrabble, or map your dictionary to a distribution in an English language corpus and score them based on rarity.

As a one time practitioner of "good old-fashioned" AI I had thought it was ETAOIN SHRDLU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etaoin_shrdlu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU

That's close enough, and it'll vary based on the dataset. In the provided link, it's ETAOIN SHRDLCU, which is almost the same.

It's completely broken on desktop in Firefox - they're rectangles and the letters fall outside the boxes one settled, so I can't tell an L from an I without memory. Also, the buttons move at the bottom when you tap on letters so it makes it hard to press them. Consider mapping the arrow keys on a keyboard.

Hi, I didn't check on firefox. Thanks for feedback, I will try to fix these issues. Thank you

It's also broken in IE (not that I use IE... but since you didnt check FF)

Reminds me of Klax.

its fixed now.

Hi I'm the creator of http://wordsmashing.com , awesome game, needs some music graphics sounds levels polish ect, I think it's interesting having to manually click to your word and click destroy, made the game feel a bit harder and slower paced to me but perhaps some advanced wordies would like that, I would make it automatic if 3 or more letters

Hi,Thanks for the feedback. I'm trying different ideas to make gameplay experience better. Btw nice game.

That looks interesting, but I don't understand how to play. I click a letter, then click a box to slide into in order to get it closer to my target space but after sliding once the game stops.

Fun. You might want to disable double tap to zoom. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/touch-actio...

thanks.

Very cool idea.

Someone will polish this up and it will be one of those mobile games that will go viral for a little while.

Suggestions, add a comprehensive scoring solution, two letter combos (ng, io, ee, etc), classic tetris shapes would probably work too in blocks of three to keep the two letter combo rule.

Nicely done!

You could score words a la scrabble

absolutely LOVE the idea... however the dictionary is way to limited, also there needs the "preview" screen (ie tells you what letter is coming up next)

Also I suspect you need more vowels or more room to "stack" continents.

Mate, I want this game for my kids to play... please get this done!

finally, have you thought of a multiplayer version?

Check out "tetrinet". make this game on android and I'll play it all day lol!

Thank you very much.

"ie tells you what letter is coming up next" ^ this i have in mind, hope i will implement it soon.

As of now no plan to make it multiplayer or on android.

I'm glad you liked it.

Awesome, suggest you make valid words clear automatically

I have that in mind, working on it.

This idea was developed into a mildly popular game in the early 90’s called Wordtris.

Here’s an example of the gameplay (Not my video): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EYO5WbBfp-E

The copyrights can be traced to Atari holdings, who also have a license for Tetris (who is turn pretty aggressively enforces the brand), so watch out for that.

Cool! When you think you have had an original thought turns out there is prior art.

Wordtris seems to be better featured; better distribution, list of completed words, eraser block, peek at next block and graphics :)

Hi, Thanks everyone for amazing response.

I just updated it with some most common issues fixed.

1) Now select letters in any order, if its a valid word then it will disappear.

2) Now showing next letter in upper right corner

3) Fix issue which was blocking keyboard events

4) Fixed it on Firefox.

And added some colors to buttons:)

Thank you once again. Cheers!

Some classic tetris features that would help:

Let me see the next letter after this one.

Let me hold onto a letter and swap it with the current one on the screen.

I appreciate it's a big complexity problem to scan for all available words but I think that the click functionality could be improved a lot by just highlighting words that you'll allow me to destroy.

Thanks. I'm trying to achieve this.

I think the dictionary should be more complete. The first word I composed was "kelp" and it didn't identified it as a valid word. Or maybe it's completely broken in Firefox, the "destroy" button doesn't appear.

It seems the player needs to click words to make them vanish, while letters continue falling - this is the first thing that should be changed.

ok this is common issue. i will fix.

I see, as of now you have to select it in 'right' sequence,

which means first K then e , l and finally p.

this is an issue, i should sort it. I will fix this soon. Thanks.

Very cool. I don't like that it grabs all the key presses, I couldn't CTRL+D (Bookmark) and I couldn't refresh the page with F5 or CTRL+R. Legitimately thought my browser was crashing XD

oh, will fix this soon. Thanks

Ah nice work!! I’m also working on a word game for my kids. Also using CRA! https://nora.now.sh

Already seen:) its nice.

I'd be curious to hear about your experiences/challenges. I really liked the loading/splash screen.

I tried the PWA/offline mode on Safari/iOS but that's not working right now.

Reminds me a lot of a Tetris-with-words game called Puzzlejuice that was put out a few years ago by the same studio that released Threes and started the 2048 craze.

Good job!

Speaking of 2048, I made a clone called "words-oh-so-great" [1,2] that uses letters instead of numbers, and they disappear when forming a word.

[1]: https://github.com/nathell/wosg [2]: http://212.47.254.231/wosg/

Nice!

It didn't recognise 'Arid' or 'Swap' as words, which I was amazed I lucked into. It seems a very hard prospect to get anywhere, otherwise. Is this something to do with my choice of browser? I don't use Chrome, nor ever will aside from testing.

You mention elsewhere in the thread here that you didn't test on Firefox. May I ask what you DID test in?

hey, i fixed it on firefox. it should work fine. not sure why it didn't recognise those words, I will check in dictionary.

Also its not automatic, you have click on each letters of word, then if its valid word then it will disappear.

This is an awesome prototype, that I think not only has a lot of potential in terms of growing it into something people would play, but I think it could be a very useful tool for people learn languages and improve their skills.

It's inspiring, seriously. Good work so far, and I hope you continue to develop it and are successful for whatever your definition of "success" might be :)

Thank you very much. I made this just for fun, but now kind of response I have received for this I will surely try to make it better. cheer!

Create various difficulties with speed and an amounts of wild cards.

I got really bored and quit when it dropped me a bunch of letters that couldn't be made into words in any order.

The interface is also shit. Holding down the down button (I'm using a mouse) should just drop it.

The cubes feel much to big.

Extra fun could be had if one could rotate the u into an n, the Z into an N, the p into a d, q into a b and I into H.

This was fun and kind of addictive. Only right now it seems to be giving letters between "R" and "U" in the alphabet more than 50% of the time. That's very challenging.

Its made using create-react-app and source code is on Github.

Please play and give suggestion to improve this. Thanks.

The game works great on mobile.

But I have no idea how to win or what the rules are? I assume a full row of letters will clear the row?

I was expecting words to come down, but there were only letters.

Maybe add a little help screen when the game starts, to show the rules of the game.

Agree, I will add a help screen soon. As of now here is game play video https://youtu.be/qvoL5J-jsFA

Thanks

Here is the game play video: https://youtu.be/qvoL5J-jsFA

you should drop two vowel/consonant, vowel/vowel or consonant/consonant letters (in that frequency order)

Indeed, I had trouble getting any way near enough vowels

good idea.

I don't understand how you play. I successfully made some four letter words by nothing happened

same. got no points for "epic" and "pause"

Use the tetris shapes instead of just a single cube. Would make it harder but much more fun.

It's zooming in and out of the page while I'm trying to play. iPhone x Safari

great idea, but same here - makes it unplayable - will try again in a few days

suggestions -

- bigger grid, more rows and columns

- larger letters, more contrast

- random doubles and phonemes

- ok to spell backwards

- splash for longer words and 2-directions

- get roger dean to make you a logo -jk

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