Show HN: I made a word building game supporting anagrams and one handed use

Posted by busymom0 5 days ago

Hi everyone,

Wanted to share a game I built. It's called Unscramble! and I believe it's the simplest word building game.

Rules: You get a few letters on screen. You need to make one word with all the letters. Tap a letter to select. Tap again to deselect. Faster you go, better you score.

If you enter anagrams of the word it's looking for, it gives you extra points. If you are stuck, you can either "Ask Friend" or get Hint.

You get extra points for getting the word fast but you don't get penalized for taking too long.

I believe the simplicity of the game along with big touch buttons makes it perfect for one handed use.

There's 6 difficulty levels in the game, and settings for things like toggling the timer, relaxing background music, sound effects, haptic feedback, removing the background animation.

If you want to try:

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/unscramble-word-anagram-relax/...

Would love to hear feedback to improve it.

Comments

Comment by Klooder 14 hours ago

The one-handed constraint is the most interesting design decision here - big touch targets and designing around the physical context of use rather than around the content. I hit a cousin of this problem recently: a workout timer that can't require taps because the user's hands are occupied. Curious what one-handed changed most in your layout - did it kill any features you wanted?

Comment by t_gamer_kle 1 day ago

Highly similar: https://pzlgames.com/games/18words/

Comment by busymom0 1 day ago

My first inspiration was:

https://wordnerd.co/23words/

From that discussion, I came across 18words. Not sure if it's still the case but last time I tried, it didn't allow anagrams of words. And the main thing I didn't like was the timer which used to not allow entering word after 30 second was over. Last time I checked, they had no hints and no difficulty levels.

Unscramble! fixes these as such:

Anagrams are allowed and give extra points.

My timer counts upwards. So it doesn't penalize you for taking very long to get the answer. You can take as long as you want. But if you get answer very quickly (varies per length and difficulty levels), then you get extra points.

Timer can also be disabled if one wants to play in peace.

You can get hints for words. Like first letter, second letter etc.

There are 6 difficulty levels which is based upon how popular those words are in everyday use and length.

Unscramble! let's you play forever. It's not a daily thing. So you can play as many words as you want whenever.

As a native mobile app, the experience is also much nicer as it allows me to use things like haptic feedback, Game Center integration for global leaderboards and iCloud syncing of played words across devices so that same words don't show up again (obviously until all words are depleted but that's going to be a long time later).