New UI!

The main menu has been changed, and some new features are coming soon!

Dictionary Polishing

I added in some much needed polishing to the dictionary panel that added in yesterday. I added a loading panel as it used to just show the previous term you looked up, then jumped to the new one when it loaded. Currently its just a progress bar with a small animation to it, but it works for now. I’m also thinking about reusing it in other areas too.

New Credit Screen!

I’ve been wanting to change the credits screen for a while now, as its just been a static wall of text. For right now it mostly still is a static wall of text. But with more stuff! I have some tweens when you hover over the text which was missing in the old version. I’m not entirely happy with this one, but its still much better.

New Main Menu Buttons! What are those about?

Added two new buttons. One for level select, and one for a stats page (not added yet! but soon). Now when you press the big play button you go to the last level you were playing, instead of level select.

What’s next for Word Chains

I have some plans for what’s next for Word Chains, like a stats page! I’m also planning some new puzzles.

#New Dictionary Feature & Bug Fixes!

We are back!

School finally caught up to me so things slowed down over the last week, but I think I’m back! So lets get started!

New Dictionary Feature

One thing I’ve wanted to add for a while was a way to look up the definition for the current word. So now using a this free API I added this feature. It still has some small polishing things that need to be done but overall it pretty much done.

Bug Fixes

I also took some time todo some bug fixing. Most of them originated from added the Timed Mode like leaderboards displaying scores incorrectly and medium difficulty level progress being saved in timed mode. Another bug that I fixed was UI scaling. When you play WordChains on a phone, the buttons and everything can be really small. It only took some changes to the project settings but it was very needed as the end goal is for WordChains to be on the app store!

##Puzzle Generation
One small thing that I also worked on was making levels more normal. The way levels are generated is by picking random words from the dictionary that I’m using, and seeing if they connect. This gets us to have some really weird words. I wrote a little program in python to clean up the words but checking if the word use frequency was above a certain level. This hasn’t been implemented yet but it hopefully will be in the coming week.

Thanks for reading!

I’ve been trying to put more effort into these devlogs, plus I haven’t posted in over a week so wanted to let everyone know what’s going on with WordChains! If you want to play it you can do so here although this version doesn’t have all the new features yet. You can follow the project to be notifed when it does though!

Timed Mode

What’s new

Added new timed mode, where you have 90 seconds to complete as many medium difficulty levels as you can. Then your score gets submitted to a leaderboard.

This was not very difficult to add but I didn’t have a lot of time, so it’s very unpolished right now. I need some balancing and some tweens to add to it. There is also a lot of bugs that I think I introduce that I get to go hunt for later today. YIPPEE!

Whats coming up soon

Puzzle generation rehaul. The way I created all 200 levels for WordChains is through a algorithm that hunts through every possible puzzle combination that could be made from the dictionary that I’m using. This worked for the last shift but It wont work in the long run as some puzzles just have completely random words that don’t seem like they are really words. In other words I think I need to update the dictionary that the algorithm takes from.

Level Reset Button

Just shipped!

I just got the reviews in for the last ship, and things were very positive! There were a couple little bugs that people found as well as a lot of people wanting one feature: a level reset button! So I added one!

What’s coming up in the future

Based on recent feedback, I want to continue working on this game with the end goal of publishing WordChains into the Apple App Store. So here are some of the features that are coming soonish:

• Timed Mode: See how many levels you can complete in a set amount of time.
• Daily Streak and Personal Records: Keep track of everything.
• EVEN MORE PUZZLES: But also working on condensing the puzzle files, and imporving the quality of the puzzles, as currently some of the words are really random, which make the puzzle a bit tricky
• Better Credits Screen(?): I want to improve the current credits screen, to add more personality so its not just a wall of text. This isn’t a necessary feature but something that I would like to add.

Last touches!

Planning on shipping tomorrow, so finished up some small things. I added a label to the top of the game screen to tell you what level you are currently on. The other big thing I did was update the README with all the updates in the new version. All I have to do tomorrow is hit ship!

Documentation

Took some time to update/add documentation to most of the scripts. I haven’t done this for a very long time, and since the project will likely be shipped very soon, they should be intelligible. Also took some time to update some images in the README to reflect recent updates.

200 NEW LEVELS!

Yes you are reading that right folks! 200 new levels (and the ability to easily add tons more) have been added to Word Chains! A while ago for the daily puzzle creation I created some algorithms to create a list of puzzles from all the words in the dictionary that I’m using, and then randomly select some. I ended up generating 4,125,015 puzzles with word lengths of 4-8 letters. I then generated difficulties and selected 50 per each difficulty. I then created this new UI for the level select screen. I then wasted an hour trying to find a very small bug that was caused by my over complicated code! Where in the home stretch now and word chains is almost ready to be shipped!

Final Touches

Final Touches for Hackadash, including some formatting, an asciinema demo recording. Also just created a github release (although I don’t know if I did it right) but now everything is ready to ship!

Edit: I just added the project to PyPI so go check it out at https://pypi.org/project/Hackadash/

New Settings and Color!

Added Teal as a color! I want to add more colors, but I’ve used most of the rainbow now so don’t know how many more will be coming. I also added the ability to change your leaderboard display name, and the ability to replay the tutorial. These can both be found in the settings page. Getting the leaderboard display name to change was actually more challenging than I thought it would be due to a bug in the Godot CheddaBoard SDK that I was using, but the updated Github had a version that worked! One thing to note about changing the display name: The change will not appear on the leaderboard until the next time you submit a score, or in other words till the next day.

Time Range Switching and README updates

Got time switching in, so now you can see your total time for total, last 7 days or the current day. I also took some time today to add to the README file, including some new images and some better instructions on how to use the app, and what features there are. As I said in the last devlog, I only have one more feature I need to add before shipping! Hopefully I can get that done in the next couple of days!

Styling!

I’m just going to start off by saying I hate styling these boxes. Anyway, hackadash now shows top projects, and top languages, as well as total time in a big font. Everything is separated into related boxes. In the future I hope to make this a little bit more uniform, but other than that I have one more feature to add before this project is ready to ship!

Leaderboard and Daily Puzzles Complete!

Got the leaderboard to work and finished up some polishing touches to this leaderboard screen. The big challenge today was getting the chosen nickname to save and be used, then not prompt for it again (although I’m planning on being able to change it in settings later). I also changed my API that I was using to get the time, so I could get the correct daily puzzle, to UTC to align with CheddaBoards daily reset for my leaderboard. Another big thing was you can now only play the daily puzzle once! This took a bit longer than I would have liked, but oh well!

Daily Puzzle and Leaderboard(kinda)

Today was all about the daily puzzles. I generated a list of about 360 puzzles, then used an API to fetch the day of the year, and got the puzzle at that index. All in all that part was super easy! But the leaderboards, not so much. They are still being worked on in fact! I’m trying to use a service called CheddaBoards but I keep running into random issues that shouldn’t be issues. I think I’m just going to switch my leaderboard service, and rewrite all the code. But I need a break today, as 5 hours is a lot of coding for me.

Tutorial and New Color

One piece of feedback that I got from playtesting was to add a tutorial. So I made it so when you first play the game, the tutorial mode is activated. This shows a hand that will show you how to drag the letters. If you need the animation to replay you can use the hint button at no cost. Another quick thing I added was a new color, Green! It might be tweeked in the future but for now I’m happy with it.

Updated Repo Organization and README

Last week I shipped Word Chains, and the reviews are back! People seem to like it and even 4 minuets before logged on to post this devlog, Word Chains was given a Super Star! Wow! Thanks everyone!

Feedback from the ship was amazing, although there were some comments about a couple things, like the repo being messy. This is what I worked on today was cleaning up the repo and adding some more stuff to the README like update notes, and the project’s file structure.

In the near future I plan on adding a couple things like… daily puzzles with leaderboards, a actual tutorial, new colors and more!

API Calls

Added in some data from the Hackatime API, using bearer auth. I ran into a lot of trouble getting the API’s to accept some data, as the API’s use different keywords for the current user. For example one use ‘current’ to indicate the current user by the API key, and one uses ‘my’. Once all that was working It was taking a bit to load the UI as the the http requests had to finish first, so I did a little research and found out about textual workers, that fixed the problem right up. All in all a lot got done today.

v0.3b Finished!

I just uploaded the v0.3b builds to by itch page so you can play with all the new updates here! This update added the new level select screen and the 5 new levels. I added a couple little tweeks this morning before finally uploading everything to itch.io. And for the first time I created a Windows and Linux builds, which went much smoother than I thought.