First whack

gummbum on 2011/05/12 05:18 of Gumm And Hisself

I wasn't sure what my involvement in Pyggy would be. Our PyWeek team, Multiverse Factory, is interested. We just haven't mobilized yet. In the meantime I needed something to chew on while I tried to put a dent in my DVR backlog. This is it.

And I thought what the heck, why not Pyggy it as a solo entry.

I began the game logic from scratch a couple weeks ago, and day by day it is shaping into the casual jumbled word solving game I always wanted. It is currently playable. No race the clock mode, no pointless arbitrary score keeper, and no stupid license key to lose. Just pure mindless word solving fun. Er... if you can call word solving mindless.

Some days it's been an interesting challenge. Like: how can I possibly fit 400+ words in a tiny area and stay sexy. Move over, Megan Fox.

Here is the project site.

And here is the first whack.

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Comments

gcewing on 2011/05/12 23:09:

Looks promising! You should post the code on the Pyggy site.

BTW, I found some cases where it didn't recognise what seemed like perfectly cromulent words -- "fears", "fires" and "dived" if I remember correctly. I was using the smallest word list at the time, but it's not as if they're particularly obscure words or anything.

gummbum on 2011/05/13 00:24:

Hey, looks like you found some feedback for the Gutenberg project. :) I grep'ed the normal list and the words are indeed not there. They are in the hard and insane lists, though. Gutenberg's word lists are huge, but I too have noticed they are missing some common words/tenses/plurals. I had the same problem with my favorite commercial word game, too. No word list/dictionary is perfect. The "normal" list used in the game is the "COMMON.TXT". It is the smallest general English list, so missing word variations may just be one of the pitfalls of that list. I will think about this. Maybe there is some way to smooth over that bump. Thanks for the feedback!

gcewing on 2011/05/15 23:14:

As an alternative to including a dictionary with the game, have you considered sending a query to one of the on-line dictionary servers out there on the web?

gummbum on 2011/05/16 04:44:

v0.0.1 is released.

Based on the feedback from gcewing, I spent some time examining the common word list. There were many(!) common forms of root words missing, and it was obvious the gaps would quickly break any fun. So I hacked the list--intelligently enough, I hope--with forms ending in -es, -s, -ed, -d, -er, -r. This added about 29,000 words to the common list. In all my follow-on testing I only tripped over one missing word, which I then added. I am, of course, interested in getting more such reports. Thanks in advance.

Next I added something I'd wanted from the start: word definition lookup. When my fave commercial game came out it lacked the feature. It was unsatisfying to learn the words the game knew without learning their meanings, and a pain to look them up outside the game. I was quite glad when they added the feature. Release 0.0.1 includes an English dictionary from StarDict. It's very nice and fairly complete. The only drawback is its size. The in-game reader is simple and hopefully adequate.

Also in this release is a README, more/better tips, new or enhanced interactions, a wider range of Play buttons, and a richer command line.

Hope you enjoy! Looking forward to feedback.

gummbum on 2011/05/16 12:53:

Yes, I considered doing the online thing. I like the idea. But in the end there were too many cons, and I shot it down. I am not keen on relying on an external resource that could disappear. I also wasn't enthusiastic about scraping HTML for the info I care about, especially since page format can change radically overnight. And providing a means and documentation to configure the lookup service could be quite a trick, especially since no two services are alike--again, requiring robust HTML scraping.

Including all dependencies ensures long term playability. I suppose I could mitigate the size problem by releasing two versions, one with StarDict and one without. Get the small package if you care about size or don't care what the words mean.

Opinions?

gcewing on 2011/05/17 09:08:

I was thinking of something much simpler, like just pointing the user's web browser at the page. If you made the query URL configurable, the user could change it if the default site disappeared or he preferred to use a different one.

Making the dictionary an optional download sounds like a good idea, then it can be played either stand-alone or web-connected.

gummbum on 2011/05/18 03:00:

Ok! How's this: Best of both worlds.

Two distros, one with StarDict and one that uses a free online dictionary.

And if yer all about the guessing and none o' the learning, you can even turn off lookups entirely in the settings file.

I considered farming it out to the browser, only briefly. I really don't like when games do that to me.

Cheers.