Word Hunt

A word game of my own

I love word games, and I wanted to try making one of my own. The idea was to have a theme and fill the entire board with words from that theme, with no filler letters left over. You’d try to find every word until you’d covered the whole board, and get extra credit for other valid words you found along the way.

I wanted a new, randomly generated board each time, using a collection of words I’d sourced. I also wanted difficulty levels with different word lengths, and eventually different vocabulary difficulty too.

I reaallyy like pretty colors (if you can’t tell from this website) so I made it a pastel theme!

Building the prototype

I started with a Python and Flask backend to generate the boards, using a word collection from NLTK. The browser side was JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, with a drag-to-select interface and SVG lines to highlight the words you found.

The generator was the starting point, but I didn’t get it working without bugs. It tried to place words along connected paths through the grid, then filled the leftover squares with random letters. So the themed boards, full-board word coverage, and difficulty settings were still things I wanted to build.

One especially frustrating problem was getting the highlight lines to line up with where I was dragging on screen. Resizing the page could throw them off too. I built this in 2024, before I was using AI agents, and I’d be curious to revisit that problem with the experience and tools I have now.

Where I left it

After I found a New York Times game with a similar idea, I put this prototype aside. I’d still like to pick it up again in my free time one day, and maybe I’ll try to find some way to make it different!