Show HN: Wordit – Change One Letter, Keep the Chain Going

aatum47 2 days ago 27 commentsRead Article on victorribeiro.com

ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

Hi everyone,

I got this idea for a game where, starting from a four letter word you need to go as deep as you can in your vocabulary, changing only one letter per word.

bear -> beer -> peer...

Each correct word gives you 1 point

Each incorrect word takes one life away from you, you start with 3

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

86% Positive

Analyzed from 555 words in the discussion.

Discussion (27 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

hasudon7171•8 minutes ago

That's interesting.My native language is not English, so I can study English words throught this site

tty456•1 day ago

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?

quuxplusone•about 13 hours ago

+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."

atum47•1 day ago

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

atum47•about 6 hours ago

Can paxcodex write a few words on how he got a score of 6472? I'm recovering from surgery and it is hard for me to do anything now, even type.

saulpw•about 11 hours ago

I played Poople for a few months, same concept but with an actual goal achievable in a few minutes.

https://poople.com/

asimovDev•about 22 hours ago

Is 'ment' a word? I had 'went' and wrote 'ment' on a whim and it accepted it and I was quite surprised.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ment

according to Merriam-Webster it's only a suffix

LearnYouALisp•about 16 hours ago

Oxford (an "exhaustive" dictionary) has several transitive verbs:

https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=ment

vova_hn2•about 15 hours ago

I wish it would show the whole chain in the end, perhaps augmented with dictionary meanings or links to Wiktionary.

atum47•about 14 hours ago

that can be done

nathan03•about 5 hours ago

"liam" isn't in the dictionary?

uberex•2 days ago

This sort of thing was a favourite in puzzle books except you had to get to the end word.

Fun play!

I soon realized get to a nice word where the first letter can be replaced alot like "buck".

atum47•2 days ago

After the initial prototype, I was playing to see if the game was fun, I realized that from time to time you can get a whole new word by changing one letter. I'm glad you liked it

shwetarkadam257•about 13 hours ago

Reminds me of wordle , fun concept!

tim-projects•1 day ago

LARP wasn't in the dictionary. I feel cheated.

atum47•1 day ago

don't blame me, I used the biggest dictionary I could find

omeysalvi•1 day ago

Nice very entertaining

nosioptar•1 day ago

The keyboard control on mobile is tedious. Have to tap in letter box to get keyboard, keyboard disappears after entering letter, have to repeat for each letter. It'd be a huge improvement to let me type all four letters without exiling my keyboard to mordor.

atum47•1 day ago

You're not supposed to type more than one letter. You click the box you want to edit, type the letter you want to change and click check.

shmeeed•about 22 hours ago

FF on Android: my keyboard doesn't auti-hide and covers the check button, I need to hide it manually each time.

nosioptar•1 day ago

Oh, that makes more sense.

mgianluc•about 19 hours ago

love it

atum47•about 14 hours ago

thank you

naikrovek•1 day ago

“bapt” was my starting word.

I was doomed to fail. “bapt” are you kidding?

rothos•1 day ago

rapt, rape, rare, dare, ...

naikrovek•about 17 hours ago

"rapt" dammit. oh well. me and words are not on friendly terms. never have been.

quuxplusone•about 14 hours ago

Or bait (or probably baht or batt).