CROSS-PERDLE
Solve themed crosswords where the clues to the answers lay hidden in your own guesses.
Play the game HERE
Name: Cross-Perdle
Game Genre: 2D Crossword Puzzle.
Team Size: 2
Game Engine: Perlenspiel 3.
Source Control: GitHub Desktop.
Elevator pitch:
A 2D, crossword puzzle, which brings together the concept of crosswords and ‘Wordle’ into one easy-going game. The crosswords in this game also contain no hints, but instead all words in a puzzle follow a certain theme. Players must use the theme to guess their way to victory.
My Contributions
Audio Designer
I was in charge of finding a theme for the game that would fit the calm nature of crossword puzzles, but engaging enough to keep the player focused.
Level Designer
My role as level designer was to design each level and decide what theme to use. I was also in charge of difficulty scaling for the puzzles.
Visual Designer
Because the Perlenspiel engine only allows a maximum of 32x32 pixelated ‘beads’, color usage is one of the main ways to express emotion in the game.
Gameplay
The crossword contains no hints at the bottom of the screen, but instead provides the player with a theme for each crossword. It also provides a given word, which is usually most associated with the theme (for example, Level 2 has a ‘beach’ theme, and the given word is ‘palm’.
When the player clicks on a spot and guesses a word, they are shown each letter in three colors.
Red: The letter is not in the word.
Orange: The letter is in the word, but at the wrong spot.
Green: The letter is in the word, and in the right spot.
The first screen presented to players shows the players each puzzle, and uses glyphs to represent their themes.
This puzzle is based on buildings found in my universities campus.
If the player does get stuck, there is a hint button on the bottom which randomly shows a letter for a word that has not been discovered yet.
Design Process:
The first part of the design process was figuring out what type of a puzzle to create. For this step, I used the limited engine capabilities to my advantage, and kept the idea very simple. When thinking about the game, I also remembered the professor stating that crosswords could be made on the engine. This was my first step in the design process.
The first problem I encountered was that the engine doesn’t really display text properly, and so it would be quite hard to display hints at the bottom of the page. This is when I thought of simple puzzles that required little-to-no text to display hints. This is when I thought of Wordle’s usage of color. If there is one thing the Perlenspiel engine can do, its color. I then simply combined the two ideas and came up with the game idea.
The next step was discussing with my partner how to write the program in JavaScript. There was also a big problem impending on us; what library would we use to determine if a word was, in fact, a word?
Searching through a Scrabble dictionary was my first thought, but having to reference a massive file for each input would cripple performance.
And so, we came to the conclusion to just allow the player to input any word, be it real or not. The game was already difficult enough without the presence of hints.
Additionally, through playtesting we found that it would actually be easier for the player to try guess a real word than try remember which letters were correct if they brute-forced the puzzle.
On the right, you can see that in the final variation of the game, players are able to input any letter in any order they want.
