I wrote this because:
- I was curious if you could play wordle without knowing how many letters you were guessing.
- I wanted a simple fresh project to use to learn the new version of Svelte (Svelte 5).
As I built the game, I realized the question of what is "right" is made trickier when you don't know how many letters you're guessing. For me, it's important to know if you got the first letter, sure, but also it matters if you have the last letter pinned down.
And then of course you'd like to know how long the word is!
So I ended up coding this to give you feedback both from the left (i.e. first letter, second letter, ...), and from the right (i.e. last letter, penultimate letter, ...). That design choice made the game pretty hard to grok, so then I had to do some design work to make it easier to understand how to play and how to use the clues. After tweaking the interface, I've discovered I can pretty much always get the word in 6 guesses or fewer, so the old familiar 6-guess framework applies!
The design inspiration came from David Jonathan Ross's font "Indoor Kid" which I got as part of his "Font-of-the-Month" club. It was fun creating a brand new look for a wordgame! It turns out that his font was also designed with variable width, which was very helpful when creating a game where inputs could be any number of letters long.