Sorry folks, something broke! Looking into it and will post here with updates.
UPDATE #2: Seeing full recovery now (Aug 9, 10 PM PST).
UPDATE #1: Looks like Railway is having problems - https://status.railway.com/incident/RL8FRJE6
Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win
21–30 of 38 posts
Re: Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win
#22Nice. I didn't know you could reuse the same letter! How are you handling the multiplayer framework?
I'm using Phoenix LiveView + PubSub to keep everyone's browser in sync.
Re: Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win
#23This seems like a fun way to practice English vocabulary. One thing confused me, though — I thought the goal was to make the longest word using all of the given letters, but it looks like you can also compete with words that don’t use every letter. Is that intentional?
Re: Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win
#24Nice job. But wouldn't accept tnetennba [1]. :)
Seriously though reminds me of the game "Countdown" in the series IT Crowd where they compete to find the longest word in a random assortment of vowels and consonants.
Re: Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win
#25Idea: it would be more interesting/competitive if you could immediately see others' submissions, and if those words were then "taken" and can't be reused. Currently you're just kind of twiddling your thumbs after you submit and run out of ideas. It was also not immediately obvious to me that you can submit multiple words, so I was wasting time entering and deleting attempts before finally submitting the best one. Fin…
Really great points, thanks for commenting.
One nuance: if you show others' submissions right away, the game turns into a "race" where speed matters a lot more. That could be fun too (a different game mode?). I might think about showing something like "Opponent X found A _ _ _ _" or "Opponent X found a 5 letter word".
Re: Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win
#26This seems like a fun way to practice English vocabulary. One thing confused me, though — I thought the goal was to make the longest word using all of the given letters, but it looks like you can also compete with words that don’t use every letter. Is that intentional?
Yes, it's intentional to allow words that don't use all the letters. It can be very tricky to think of a panagram every time (word that has all 7 letters used at least once). Hence, we don't require every submission to be a panagram. I'll work on making the instructions clearer!
There is a bit of an interesting related sharp edge here. Sometimes the longest word for a given set of letters actually does NOT use all the letters! I've thought of a number of approaches to address this tension, but, opted to keep scoring dead simple in the end. I may experiment in the future on this topic though.
Re: Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win
#27Fun game. Would be nice if there was a single player mode that simply prints the letters and at the end shows the longest word that was missed. That way you can play it offline and place a phone in the center of the table and people can play around it with pen and paper or by just thinking of the word and everyone announces at the end.
Thanks for checking it out! A single-player/offline mode does sound fun too. I do think I will end up adding support for a number of variations and modes.
Re: Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win
#28This seems like a fun way to practice English vocabulary. One thing confused me, though — I thought the goal was to make the longest word using all of the given letters, but it looks like you can also compete with words that don’t use every letter. Is that intentional?
I'd also like to expand it to work with other alphabetic languages too.
Re: Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win
#29Super fun, thanks for sharing! Might be handy to explain the rules up top (can't seem to see them): - Proper nouns allowed - Can reuse letters - Longest word possible might not use all the letters
Thanks for playing! Yeah you're right, rules need to be spelled out a bit better.
Re: Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win
#30Gentle and fun. Reminds me of isketch back in the days of flash. I look forward to playing this with my mother.
Thanks for checking it out!