GoKawiilI've been playing word games my whole life. My mom has been regularly beating me at Scrabble since I could spell. I lose frequently to my wife Maya at Scrabble, and my kids beg to play Wordle every time we are waiting for a food order. My brother-in-law even made us a crossword to commemorate our wedding date.
After trying out NYT's Crossplay recently for a few weeks, I set out to build a new word game from scratch. I had a few goals for myself:
It's easy for my family members to play - and challenging Build a game you can put down and walk away from A familiar tech surface (simple mobile web, native apps)
What is Wordtrak?
Wordtrak is a 1v1 word battle. There's 3 or 5 "traks" - you can pick any trak to play a word on, and your opponent chooses one to play on as well. The winner of a trak is who has the highest point total. There's definite strategy and tension based on what letters you draw, and which tile you picked. Here's an example 5-trak game where shockingly, my mom lost against my dad:
Thanks to Kevin Purdy, I had a tag line too: "Scrabble that doesn't drag". Sadly, I can't trademark that one verbatim. For the game dev curious, here's how I built it from scratch, with a ton of help from Claude and some friends' feedback.
Design, Design, Design
I started first with just laying down the rules for the game with Claude and sticking purely to markdown docs - I'd bounce ideas back and forth with Maya, and try to get to a game loop going. I even had a few practice / "mock" games purely in the LLM to test that out. This phase lasted nearly a week, with no real code being committed.
Early on I knew that a train theme would help set the tone visually and distinctively from other games on the market. (And besides, trains are awesome.) I've been getting ads for the Vestaboard for months, and figured a split-flap display would be a fun way to show the letters. Combined with the impulse purchase of a new domain, I was committed. Claude helped me out on the visual design side as well:
We still haven't written any real code, or a game still, but it looked fun! I obsessed over the split-flap displays, which mechanically operate in a fascinating way, and I wanted to really make pushing these buttons feel...clacky.
... continue reading