Better Words List

I just re-architected the way the game is set up so that I can include a much larger dictionary. you should now be able to find basically any English dictionary word will suffice for judge number one. Hopefully this makes the game feel more fair!

When I first made this game, I tried using https://github.com/dolph/dictionary as a means to get popular English words that would be guessable as goals. Unfortunately, this led to a bunch of friends giving me feedback that words like “mull” were not included and that was no good.

I updated to use a much larger dictionary based off popularly used English words on wikipedia, but I found it took too much bandwidth to be able to load reasonably quickly on mobile, which was a deal-breaker. I settled for a smaller list of English wikipedia words but it had the same problem as in the beginning.

Finally, I realized I could do the whole thing using websockets, which allowed for the best of both worlds. Now, I host an iframe that connects to a server hosted by https://render.com/ that handles the websocket connection, and whenever you guess, it just checks the giant dictionary that’s kept in-memory on the server without having to pass all that info down to the client.

The one downside is that I’m on the free tier of render, so it could take a minute for the first player each day to load the page because that makes the server boot up from being asleep. But I think that’s well worth having a better words list.