Unwordy by Omiya Games
A game about re-assembling common words into rare ones.
Screenshot & Game Link
How to Play
All instructions are given during the game. Only a mouse and keyboard is needed.
There are two phases to this game:
Phase 1
Words will fly across the screen. Collect them by hovering your mouse over each one.
The letters composing the flying words will be added into the letter-bank.
Phase 2
Using the letters from the letter-bank, enter as many valid English words (as defined by open-dictionary.github.io) as you can. Longer words gives better score, but common words used by previous players will not count.
The words you enter in Phase 2 will then be added into the word pool. Phase 1 will then grab about 750 most-frequently entered words from that word pool.
Quick Tip!
In other words, it's worth memorizing the words flying in Phase 1, as those words will likely not give any points in Phase 2.
Scoring details
- Common words: 0 points
- A word is considered common if enough players have entered them in Phase 2
- Rare words: worth the number of letters in the word
- Words are considered rare if it is within the top-10% least-frequently entered word list, or is within the top 1000; whichever list ends up being shorter.
- New words: worth double the number of letters in the word
- If previous players haven't entered the word, yet, it's considered new.
Credits
- @omiya-games did full-stack development.
- open-dictionary.github.io for the English dictionary API
Dev Notes
I hate programming in PHP and Javascript.
Known Issues
- Firefox may have rendering issues.
- Example: the name entry for leaderboard is supposed to render red text indicating one needs to enter exactly 3 alphanumeric characters. This doesn't render in some browsers.
| Version | For Judging? | Date | Description | |--- |--- |--- |--- | | v0.2.3 | Yes | 2025/10/06 | Made a series of UI fixes: fix leaderboard date display, made leaderboard name entry smaller. | | v0.2.0 | Yes | 2025/10/06 | Added a leaderboard. It grabs the last 100 entered scores, then sorts them. | | v0.1.0 | Yes | 2025/10/06 | Initial upload. Word submission working. |
Ratings
| Overall | 461th | 3.425⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 311th | 3.475⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 18th | 4.2⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 408th | 3.65⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 705th | 2.289⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 598th | 2.417⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 756th | 2.472⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 12🗳️ | 15🗨️ |
I tried to play a second round and all my submissions on phase 2 were stuck on "checking..." so I think I lost connection?
It's something I should look into. This was a tough project to work on.
I found it challenging because I don't speak English very well, but overall I enjoyed it.
Perhaps more customization options would allow for more interesting interactions. For example, instead of a name (why only three letters?), you could add a link to the user's LD page.
> why only three letters?
Partly because it's a callback to old arcades that would only accept three letters.
Mostly because I didn't have the time to add in a bad-words-censoring filter, so limiting the number of letters one could enter was an easy way to cull most of them.
Super cool concept, and really impressive to have made something with this much networking involved! If I'm not wrong and this is a server issue that is able to be fixed can you reply to this so I can revisit the game?
I am aware that restarting the game the second time often leads to errors and timeouts. I'm not entirely sure why. My first assumption would be the dictionary API I'm using isn't available, and if I were to improve on the game, that I should really look into an offline dictionary, instead. Alas, I didn't have the time to do that for this entry.
I do possibly have a bone to pick with the dictionary API that you've hooked into though: 
If we ignore a couple of miserable misspellings and my experiment with "memed", a lot of those words seem like they should be valid and it just doesn't like that I've conjugated them.
A very impressive entry, congrats.
I also ran into the "checking..." issue in my second attempt. Not sure if debugging to find the cause would be better than switching to an offline dictionary in the future.
Feels like there's a missing piece here to round out the gameplay, the first phase doesn't seem to really matter much beyond seeding letters. It goes so fast it could just as well be random and I don't think it would meaningfully change the second phase.
Maybe if there was more decision making involved it'd make the phase more impactful? Eg, if I had to choose between words instead of just collect all I can with no limits other than time.
Game worked fine, no bugs, and cool idea. Nice work!
> @abcdef65g
Hard agree on this. I'm using a dinky server where I'm not even sure it supports Python, so getting an offline dictionary hosted and ready was starting to look daunting during the game jam. If I ever get around to it, I would like to switch to a Python server and switch to using ODict or a similar library to handle the problem.
I wish there was something more of a strategic decision about collecting the words, like trying to make sure you get certain letters. In the end you end up with a ton of most letters. I think having more of a constraint in your choice of letters would make that part of the game more of a puzzle.
Overall, quite nice.