Hacker News Reader

Comment by tty456 | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

+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."

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com