Hello!
Many many years ago when I still used Yahoo messenger to communicate with distant family and friends, I remember it had a word finding game you could play together and compete for the most points, straight in the program itself. The goal was to find any word in a grid of letters in the english language horizontally, vertically and diagonally. It was a lot of fun and we played it a lot, but then eventually stopped working and was phased out. I could never really find anything similar enough that was multiplayer online, so now years later, I decided to make my own.
The difference with my game is that the goal is to find a given word instead of any word that you can find, and it’s browser-based. I was thinking of making it use a dictionary API at first, but decided against it seeing as it cost quite a lot of money to use. So I hard-coded in 80 words to play in one game. Once all the words have been played, it will start again using letters you’ve already played.
There’s three different difficulty levels to choose from: Easy, Medium and Hard. Each of the difficulties has different amount of letters on the screen. Easy has a 10×10 grid of letters while Medium has 13×13 and Hard 15×15. Each difficulty also has slightly different words in it with different lengths.
There’s no count down timer involved so you’re not competing against the clock, just each other. 🙂
The multiplayer aspect itself is based on peer-to-peer (WEBRTC), which means there’s no third-party server lying around somewhere relaying game data between players, but one player creates a game and acts as the host/server and the other players connect to that host, who is also a player of course. There’s a signaling server which connect players with the host.
Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, the game does not support Firefox browsers due to an incompatibility somewhere with WEBRTC and the game engine I’m using. Some older version of Firefox may work, but I have opted to block Firefox browsers completely until the problem has been fixed. Chrome browsers work perfectly though. You can also try any other browser you may have on hand as well, although I can’t guarantee they will work.
Once you’ve created a game, you want to share that specific room name with your friends so they can connect to it through the “join game” screen. Then you have to manually accept their join request. This is just to prevent anyone from joining a game they weren’t invited to by accident. You can be up to 6 players in one game.
When you find the given word and have selected it, you win a point. That is if not anybody else manages to find it first. 😀
There’s no “end-goal”. You play until you feel you’re done. In the end, whoever has the most points win. 🙂
The game can be played here: https://adventureassets.itch.io/wordfind-multiplayer
Have fun playing!
Feedback and bug reports are highly welcome!
Source: itch.io