I love UI animations but they can be overkill for a lot of web UIs so it was fun to have a playground where I could lean into that more. (Though I still ended up pulling back from some of my more “out there” experiments haha)
This is fantastic! You've definitely got a knack for making games like this.
I've been making some similar games with a similar tech stack, but with react-spring. Most recently I created clones of all the NYT Games puzzles.
What you want to do is find what I call a "donor letter".
Say you have:
BOAR
UPTO
MUTT
PSSA
Where you want to swap the last SA to make PSAS.
What you'll want to do here is find a 'donor letter' of either S or A. In this case we have the A of BOAR. You'll put the BOAR's A in the place you want the A in PSAS, in this case the third slot. Then put the S that is now floating down into the last slot of PSAS.
I also made a puzzle game in a similar vein slidecross.io