Danagrams
Adventures in fast prototyping for mobile and web.
Like everyone else, my family enjoyed the heck out of Wordle when it first released. We would share our daily graphs in a group chat, even organize short “tournaments” to try and out-puzzle each other. As game design goes, the combination of a single (shared) daily puzzle and an easily shared, mostly-spoiler-free “score” graph is a remarkably tight execution. Ultimately, it created a unique, asynchronous massively multiplayer experience – lightly competitive, but mostly about shared, parallel success.
Playing Wordle is fun, but being one of many people playing Wordle is even more fun. That’s special.
Danagrams, right now, is just a Wordle clone. But as is the case with most of my personal projects, it also served as a test bed for me to try some new things.
- First, one of Wordle’s core strengths was its accessibility. It’s just a webpage, fully playable on desktop or mobile devices. I went looking for an engine that could easily output to HTML (that wasn’t Unity). I’m not sold on GDevelop for future projects, but the combination of approachable scripting, easy export to web, and even a mobile client made it worth a try.
- I wanted to get some experience with UI and 2D design, and I wanted to build something fast that would still have replayability. A word game was a logical target.
I came across Vijay Pemmaraju’s Daily Dungeon recently, as well as Zach Gage & Orta Therox’s Puzzmo.com. I started thinking about other gameplay systems that could be distilled into a procedural daily challenge – especially ones with that shared, asynchronous experience that Wordle offers. So when I say that Danagrams is “right now, just Wordle” – it’s because I’m not done with it. I’ve already got some 🎣 more ⛳ ideas 🔐 in the works.
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