I haven’t done anything in pure HTML + vanilla JS since… college, probably? I’ve been swept up in the noise of frameworks and React and React frameworks (i.e. overengineering) for about as long as I can remember. The name of the game in web development these days is, more or less, Resume Driven Development. So, I’ve endeavored to get back to the basics and relearn what made me get in to web development in the first place.
The Game
For a starter game, I’ve decided to go with the classic Wordle-but-different idea that there seem to be a million of these days (shoutout to my favorite, Binary Wordle that I saw on Hacker News). It’s not Wordle per se, more just a guessing game with hints/clues. I figured a good idea would be to go with something related to my love of geography.
Game Design
As stated previously, this game is Wordle inspired but an exact Wordle style character system would be counter-intuitive, not only because country names are varying lengths but because I don’t think that sounds very fun. So, what else to do?
My mind immediately went to what is now the end state of the game, which is to give the player hints about the country of the day in descending order from most obscure to least obscure. I tried to Google around but couldn’t find anything useful (more on the decline of Google’s search here on Ed’s blog), so I had Claude return some facts for me. I’ve verified all these to avoid hallucinations, which I do for basically any AI usage now.
The user guesses reveal a new clue until all clues are exhausted, at which point the user loses. That part is still Wordle-ish. I’ve thought about making it more original, but you know what? I’m a hack! “Good artists copy, great artists steal” as Picasso said, or in the wise words of career thief Willie Sutton, “That’s where the money is”.