My daughter drew a word puzzle game on paper — rules, name, game board, everything. We built it into a real daily puzzle over a weekend.
It's a word chain: each word starts with the last letter of the previous one, climbing from 3 to 7 letters in a pizza-slice shape. Certain letters are locked in each day (pepperoni) so every puzzle is different. Scrabble-style scoring with row multipliers.
Stack: vanilla JS (no framework), Cloudflare Pages + D1 for the leaderboard. Single HTML file, ~90KB. Dictionary is NWL2023 filtered to 3-8 letter words. Puzzles are deterministic via seeded RNG so everyone gets the same puzzle each day.
We used AI heavily in the build process — she had the idea and the rules, I used Claude to translate her design into working code fast. The whole thing went from paper sketch to playable in about an hour, then we've been iterating since.
montroser•1h ago
Nice work. I found the game to be enjoyable, and couldn't stop till I got that crust, even though it took a while. Nice polish on sounds and animations.
Not sure if the pizza theme is net positive or not. It's cute and catchy, but also kinda cheapens it in a way.
tryanythingonce•2h ago
It's a word chain: each word starts with the last letter of the previous one, climbing from 3 to 7 letters in a pizza-slice shape. Certain letters are locked in each day (pepperoni) so every puzzle is different. Scrabble-style scoring with row multipliers.
Stack: vanilla JS (no framework), Cloudflare Pages + D1 for the leaderboard. Single HTML file, ~90KB. Dictionary is NWL2023 filtered to 3-8 letter words. Puzzles are deterministic via seeded RNG so everyone gets the same puzzle each day.
We used AI heavily in the build process — she had the idea and the rules, I used Claude to translate her design into working code fast. The whole thing went from paper sketch to playable in about an hour, then we've been iterating since.