South African developer launches Wortel
Software developer Francois Botha has put together and hosted an Afrikaans version of word game sensation Wordle, which he has dubbed “Wortel”. Wordle is a word guessing game based on the mechanics of the board game Mastermind.
Players have six chances to guess a five-letter word. The game indicates whether letters have been correctly guessed and whether letters are in the correct position. Earlier this month, the New York Times bought Wordle for an undisclosed sum in “the low seven figures.”
Botha explained that he could get an Afrikaans translation of the game online reasonably quickly, thanks to an open-source project called React-Wordle. While much of React-Wordle was coded by one person, it has since been handed over to others and is supported by a multitude of contributors,” Botha told MyBroadband.
Wortel’s code is hosted in Github, which automatically deploys any changes Botha pushes to where he hosts the game on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
“I think it could probably still be improved, but at least it doesn’t feel like the word list holds the game back,” said Botha.
For the word-of-the-day, Botha says he randomly re-ordered the answer list and manually eliminated some words, including hurtful or “naughty” words.
“The target word won’t be plural or diminutive, and I avoided words with circumflex (ˆ) and diaeresis (¨), such as geëet. Botha said he is still figuring out how to handle characters like e, ê, and ë.
Currently, players can guess “geeet”, even though it doesn’t look like a real word, but it won’t ever be the solution. To make managing the daily word tenable, Botha said he maintains the next 50 days’ words or so.
However, he made it clear that he does not choose the day’s word as that would be too much admin. He generated a random list and just makes sure the solutions are reasonable before putting them in the game.
Source: eNCA
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