RubikSearch

Mobile - Cancelled

PC - Ongoing

Here you can see my initial concept for the game setup. Whenever you find a word it was asking you for, then the row would become green. It didn't occur to me this would break down with multiple criss-crossed words, however. On the left is the prototype for movable objects.

The next step was to add logic to move rows and columns as a unit. You can see this on the left. This was a challenge because the row and columns needed to change dynamically depending on where they landed. This gif also shows "snapping" to the nearest grid location.

After that, I added "overflow" logic for each row and column so that when you dragged it out of scope of the grip, the tiles would roll-over to their next appropriate index in grid space. This was the foundation of the idea and I was happy to get it working within a day's time.

This is the "MVP" screen capture. Technically, this was a game! There are words (Dane and Chris) that you needed to find by moving the pieces around. This gif also shows that I had logic in place to detect words horizontally, vertically, diagonally, and all forwards/backwards combinations.

One of the names on the left puzzle is Dane. He is one of my ArenaNet friends who was working on this for a little before the project fell off. I wanted to show off the concept work he was doing for the look of the game. If the project ever continues, then this is what it might have looked it!

Several years later, this project came to my head again after playing a lot of Worlde. It got me thinking - what if this game was like that? Offered a new puzzle every day. The extra twist being pitting people against a timer and move counter to increase the competitive element. I've learned a lot of Unity in the last few years, so I ended up scrapping the old project's repository and starting fresh.

I started with an online dictionary stored in JSON. At the start of the application, I cache all viable words in a collection to be randomly selected on a new puzzle. I then created a simple puzzle generator that would take in a few parameters like (1) how big is the grid, (2) how many words, and (3) how long are the words. When generating a new word, I omit words that I have used in this puzzle, so no duplicates appear.

The next thing to do was to add UI elements to tell you which words were being added to the puzzle. A list view does nicely for this, as it can expand the content depending on the amount of words.

Lastly, I wrote some basic word finding check functions. These will help me figure out if the words in question are solved and help provide the win condition. This is where I am currently at!