

Show HN: Worldle- 24 Hour real time boggle HTML5 hackathon game - farhadabas
http://concavegames.com

======
farhadabas
Built this in 24 hours with 3 other friends as a part of an on campus Yahoo
hackathon. We just finished working on the game, so it likely has many bugs.
The game is built with html5, and the backend uses now.js. This works on the
computer, iPad, iPhone, and Android devices. I am very tired right now, so
going to leave this running, and go sleep! Game inspired by Wordament on WP7.

~~~
estenh
Super cool, but I keep clicking the wrong letters when I go diagonally on my
trackpad.

~~~
farhadabas
You can use the keyboard to type out the words. There are a few bugs with that
but it might be much easier. The game figures out which letters you want to
use as you keep typing. Just press enter when you are done typing out the
word.

~~~
estenh
Oh, sweet! Thanks!

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pmorici
It seems like you might not be properly escaping user input for their name by
the looks of the leader board which is now popping up a window with a dude
getting slapped in the face with a projectile.

~~~
nulluk
So far there has been several GIF's embedded. An alert for your
document.cookie, and a redirect to another gif. You can safely say it's not
escaping the HTML input on the leader board.

Also the matching words shouldn't be passed to the client, keep as much data
server side as possible to elevate some of the cheating, your never going to
stop all of it but that should deter most people.

All in all though kudos, looks a decent outcome for a hack project.

~~~
farhadabas
Sorry for the problems- tried fixing some of them. Hope you enjoy it!

~~~
nyellin
Someone is injecting a flash script into the background.

Edit: You might want to change the page's title. Also, thanks for the game. I
really enjoyed it.

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bryanh
Suggestion: make them circles instead of squares for easier diagonal moves.

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ca98am79
Nice job - it's addicting and fun! But I agree that diagonal can sometimes be
frustrating - I had to do it very carefully, which made me slower.

Also, I was hoping there would be more to it - like an all-time high list, or
something like that. I'm not sure how you would structure it, but I think some
kind of stored history would make me want to come back and play again.

~~~
farhadabas
Thanks- its great to hear that you enjoyed it. I am trying to fix some of the
xss and injection problems with the game right now. I plan on adding high
scores and polishing this game up!

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thedufer
You should capture the backspace key so it doesn't trigger the back button on
the browser. Just stopping the event would be nice.

~~~
nosecreek
Agreed. I keep hitting backspace when I type a wrong letter or realize a word
isn't actually there and suddenly my game is gone.

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farhadabas
Sorry for the xss- knew it was a problem but thought I would fix it later
after I got some sleep. I have done some basic sanitization for now, and will
likely make it much better later. I have also increased the time limit to 2
minutes.

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gmig
How are the boards generated with so many words?

~~~
farhadabas
I generate the letters based on the frequency of the letters in the English
language. I just do this process many times, and then use the board with the
most words. Its a very hacky brute force way :)

~~~
objclxt
It's quite an interesting problem - was actually an interview question for one
of the usual suspects that I've interviewed at.

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kunil
I am working on a similar boggle clone for facebook (there is none for my main
language).

What did you use for the server side? First I started with a Java server with
sockets but I noticed that it does not work behind the firewalls and now I am
using PHP as a messenger between the java server and flash client. Since flash
is now only doing HTTP requests it should be fine with firewalls.

Also did you pregenerate the boards? I generated some but they are not very
good.

------
Sembiance
This little greasemonkey script will play the game for you.
<http://pastebin.com/mcguLiWj>

~~~
farhadabas
Haha- I love hacker news :)

~~~
Sembiance
Is this you? (<https://twitter.com/#!/farhadabas>) Was wondering if it was. If
so, I'm gonna follow you so I can see what future projects you come up with. I
try and keep up with new HTML5 stuff.

~~~
farhadabas
yup, thats me!

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shaggyfrog
I think someone just rick-rolled the server. Was having fun up until then
(although doing diagonal moves was frustrating!)

~~~
farhadabas
I just fixed a few more problems with how I was handling input which could
have been the method for the rick roll. Will have to wait and see I guess.

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thisischris
Well, that didn't take long. <http://twitpic.com/90ru0i>

~~~
ilija139
Lol, I just also saw someone with score 100000000. It's funny how they tear
apart this game :)

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NathanKP
Maybe its just my ignorance but I have no idea how to play this. From a user
experience perspective I see that I can click on letters to make them turn red
and spin, and sometimes they turn orange but I have no idea what the point is.

~~~
Groxx
Drag to 'draw' a word :)

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tripzilch
Doesn't work in Opera? It just asks me for me name and then sticks at LOADING?

BTW you could probably come up with something prettier than a JS prompt to ask
for a name.

~~~
hassaanm
Thanks for bringing the Opera issue to our attention.

As for the name input prompt, it's true that we could've done something
better, but to be fair, this was our first time working with nowjs/nodejs and
HTML5/javascript (my first time with HTML5/javascript and I was doing the UI).

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jonnytran
What are you using for hosting?

I've been making a game and using Heroku, but when I started doing
multiplayer, I realized Heroku doesn't support socketio.

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trotsky
All I see is the word loading and an image? Chromium 17.0.963.83 in linux w/
click to play.

~~~
farhadabas
Thanks for letting me know. I will check it out when I am not so sleep
deprived!

------
aidos
Yeah cool, you know you can cheat by just looking in the console, right? :)

~~~
farhadabas
yup- will likely do server side checks in the future, but this worked well for
a hackathon. Thanks for pointing it out though!

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jorkos
i'm trying on chrome and not getting points for words (are those tallied at
the end of a session)...it's not clear and at least in my browser it shows 0
points. great job

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pradn
Congrats, team. You guys winning was quite predictable. -Prad

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deepuj
Rip off of the popular Wordament game on Windows Phone!

~~~
farhadabas
Yup thats where I got the idea from. Wanted to see if we could build an HTML5
version in 24 hours :)

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ilija139
Why the game outputs all the possible words in console?

~~~
farhadabas
Was debugging during the hackathon and forgot to turn it off :)

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roadnottaken
Impressive - so smooth on iOS!

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huhtenberg
tip, pit, sit, tit, git, tar, rat ... 2 and 3 letter words should really be
excluded. They make the game boring. Great stuff otherwise, really enjoyed
playing it. Thanks.

