WordRoute

WordRoute as a website for a word search game heavily inspired by Squardle. The main difference is that it’s open source, uses the Shavian alphabet and has hexagons instead of squares.

If you just want to play the game you can find it at wordroute.busydoingnothing.co.uk.

Building the website

Make sure you have a Rust compiler and wasm-pack installed. Then you can type:

wasm-pack build --target=web
./create-dist.sh

Then the files needed for the website will be ready in a directory called dist. The game is effectively a static website so you can just copy them somewhere where a web server can see them and start using it. Note that most browsers won’t load WebAssembly from a file:/// URL for some reason, so you can’t run the game locally without a web server.

Adding puzzles

All of the puzzles are made by hand in order to ensure the words aren’t too weird and the puzzle is fun to play. You can make your own puzzles by just drawing a grid in a text editor and then running it through the build tool. The tool ignores spaces in the grid so you can lay it out to make a visible honeycomb pattern. You can use full stops (‘.’) to leave a gap in the puzzle. For example, to make the shape of the first puzzle, you can use this grid:

     . 𐑱 𐑖 𐑩
      𐑼 𐑦 𐑤 𐑯
     𐑦 𐑑 𐑟 𐑮 𐑴
      𐑙 𐑯 𐑨 𐑑
     . 𐑒 𐑼 𐑟

Building the dictionary

In order to run the puzzle generation tool, you first need a dictionary file. This is extracted from the ReadLex JSON. You can generate this with the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/Shavian-info/readlex.git
cargo run \
      --release \
      --bin=extract-dictionary \
      -- \
      --dictionary dictionary.txt \
      --bonus-words bonus-words.txt \
      --readlex readlex/readlex.json

Now you should have a list of words in dictionary.txt and another list of what the program deems to be bonus words from the ReadLex in bonus-words.txt. In order to use the dictionary you first need to convert it to a binary format. The tool to do that is in the repo for Vaflo. You can use the following commands to do it:

git clone https://github.com/bpeel/vaflo
cargo run --manifest-path vaflo/Cargo.toml \
      --release \
      --bin=make-dictionary \
      -- \
      dictionary.bin \
      < dictionary.txt

Visualising the puzzle

Once you have the dictionary file you can run the grid through the build tool to get a list of words that it finds. Assuming you have saved your puzzle in a text file called my-puzzle.txt, you can run the tool like this:

cargo run --release \
      -- \
      --dictionary dictionary.bin \
      --bonus-words bonus-words.txt \
      --human-readable \
      my-puzzle.txt

Check that all of the letters in your grid are used at least once by looking at the counts under each letter. Now you can read through the word list and decide which words should be bonus words and which should be excluded. For this example, you can list your new bonus words in a file called extra-bonus-words.txt and the excluded words in excluded-words.txt.

Generating the puzzle code

Once you are happy with the result you can generate the final puzzle code with the following command:

cargo run --release \
      -- \
      --dictionary dictionary.bin \
      --bonus-words bonus-words.txt \
      --bonus-words extra-bonus-words.txt \
      --excluded-words excluded-words.txt \
      my-puzzle.txt

This will generate the code for the puzzle as a single line of ASCII text. If you add this to puzzles.txt and then point your browser at a web server hosting the root directory of the git repo, you can test your new puzzle in the browser.