Letter Lizard
I created this game as part of my CS798 Scripting Languages course project at the University of Waterloo.
The purpose of the project was to write an application in three different scripting languages and compare the results.
Take a look at our report
if you're interested--or, just have fun playing the game!
This was my first attempt at writing any sort of application in JavaScript, however, it was a lot easier than I expected.
Feel free to look at the source code,
download an archive containing all of the source code including the game generator,
or even incorporate some of my designs into your own project. There are few small known issues
that I haven't had time to fix yet.
Known Issues
The game doesn't work on most touch screen phones and tablets.
I know, sorry. The problem is that Apple and Android devices don't have a way to bring up the
on-screen keyboard when there is to text input present. I'm eager to learn more about development
for mobile devices, so I plan on making a version where you can tap or drag the letter tiles.
Sometimes there are so many words to be found, the list overflows the game area!
This can be blamed on the "game generator" script that I wrote to generate the sets of scrambled letters
and the words to be found. To generate the set of letters, I precomputed the frequency that each letter
occurs in the word lists that I was using, and then programmed the script to choose letters with a
probability that corresponds to their frequency. In general, this approach seems to have worked well,
but occasionally it generates set of letters that are outliers and form only a few or a lot of words.
