Solo project. I'm a .NET developer doing some new work but mainly maintaining legacy sites so this was my excuse to play with the Cloudflare stack (Pages, Workers, D1, KV).
The game: get from a start word to a target word in as few hops as possible e.g. COLD → HOT (antonym) → SPOT (rhyme) → PLACE (synonym) → PLAICE (rhyme). Each hop must be a rhyme, synonym or antonym of the previous word. All the puzzles are human created (mainly by my wife!) so there is at least one route that works. I tried creating from scripts that daisy-chained words but the results were just not fun for some reason.
The main problem turned out to be validation. I hugely underestimated this! The validation stack ended up as:
blocklist (offensive words), already-used check, stored-path check, connections payload, human-approved matches from previous games (we queue all of these to audit), WordNet subset, ConceptNet subset, extra-pairs, lemma exceptions, hypernyms, troponyms, non-rhotic rhymes. If no match found after all those client side checks we hit some APIs (Datamuse and RhymeBrain in both directions). If all else fails lemma suffix-strip, prefix-antonym check and a local rhyme check. Despite those checks there are some obvious connections that still get rejected but hopefully enough accepted ones that the player does not give up. I was quite pleased with the share dynamic; the recipient will be presented with a challenge where their result will be compared with yours at the end.
It's free, no signup, no ads. Honest feedback would be great and anything constructive even better.
nwarner0•7h ago
The main problem turned out to be validation. I hugely underestimated this! The validation stack ended up as: blocklist (offensive words), already-used check, stored-path check, connections payload, human-approved matches from previous games (we queue all of these to audit), WordNet subset, ConceptNet subset, extra-pairs, lemma exceptions, hypernyms, troponyms, non-rhotic rhymes. If no match found after all those client side checks we hit some APIs (Datamuse and RhymeBrain in both directions). If all else fails lemma suffix-strip, prefix-antonym check and a local rhyme check. Despite those checks there are some obvious connections that still get rejected but hopefully enough accepted ones that the player does not give up. I was quite pleased with the share dynamic; the recipient will be presented with a challenge where their result will be compared with yours at the end.
It's free, no signup, no ads. Honest feedback would be great and anything constructive even better.