Awfle Word Game
- Completed Game
- Victory Animation
Like many of my friends, I quickly found Wordle to be not enough of a challenge. Determined to create a game that could stump them and inspired by the Mastermind codebreaking game, I rapidly produced a shoddy but functional proof-of-concept parody version of Awfle (pronounced 'awful').
The initial version was somewhat offputting because it would refresh the page on every word to synchronously check it. In the next iteration I placed the game board in an iframe, meaning only a small section of the page had to refresh. However, writing code that could 'reach in' and 'reach out' of the iframe was extremely painstaking, and the code was still not asynchronous. Finally, I abandoned PHP as the main language for Awfle. All of the animations and word checking would be done in Javascript which resulted in faster loads and checks, but to maintain security, the answer polling is done with an AJAX PHP call so that the answer won't be within in the HTML, and still changes daily. Using Javascript also allowed me to implement a color changing feature, which lets players visualise their answers much more clearly. At the height of the Wordle craze, Awfle managed to gain over 1000 players a week, thanks to SEO techniques such as keyword optimization and fast UX.
The game is still up and running, and you can check it out here on my website. Good luck!