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Last Monday, I spent three hours laying awake in bed thinking about an idea that popped into my 🧠 for a new word game. The short story is that I built it. It's called Tumbleword, and you can play it right now: tumbleword.glitch.me For the longer story, keep reading. 1/14

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12:29 PM · Dec 12, 2022

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The late-night idea I had was simple: that the letters in a word could be arranged like tumblers in a combination lock, and that you could roll them up and down to change words. These 'tumbles' would be spent as you changed the word. So... 2/14

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You could change SCORE to SCORN by spending 9 tumbles (E and N are 9 letters apart). SCORN could change to ACORN by spending 8 tumbles (S -> Z are 7 letters apart +1 for A). Or you could go SCORE -> SWORE -> SWORD. It was clear there was a lot of possibility space. 3/14

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I also had the idea that you could cut letters out by spending tumbles. So ACORN could change to CORN by spending some tumbles. And then CORN tumbles to BORN to WORN to WORM 4/14

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It took me three days to get a prototype working. I called it Tumblewords but

convinced me to ditch the 's'. It was pretty clunky, but it worked. Some of y'all helped to test it when it was in this still-sticky newborn phase and I'm grateful. 5/14

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I started sending Tumbleword challenges to friends to see what kind of words were easy and hard, fun and boring. As a joke I send CAVIAR to my friend

, which turned out to be a *very* hard word to do anything with. 6/14

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I realized when I looked at the word, though, that it'd be pretty easy if you could tumble the whole word sideways, shifting all the letters over by one. CAVIAR becomes AVIARC which then gets to AVIARY in 4 tumbles and then to APIARY in 2 tumbles. 7/14

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So I added this feature - it's called bumping and it's a cool part of the game. 🤜🤛 8/14

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One thing that's different between Tumbleword and Wordle is that there's a high score that updates as people play. Today's word is LAUNCH and the current high score is 30. Maybe you can beat it? If you do your score will be up there for everyone to see. 9/14

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Like Wordle the seed word will change every day. Unlike Wordle you can play any word you want. FAITH: tumbleword.glitch.me/?word=faith WALLOP: tumbleword.glitch.me/?word=wallop Each of these words will get its own high score. I'm pretty eager to see what kinds of scores y'all can achieve. 10/14

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Even if you can't hit the high score, you can challenge anyone with the best score that you managed. Can any of you beat my 37 for SPARROW? tumbleword.glitch.me/?word=sparrow& 11/14

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I've never really built a whole game before, so I'm sure there are a lot of bugs in there still (if you find one you can DM me) But it was super gratifying to be able to go from insomnial idea to a working thing in just a week. 12/14

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A lot of credit there goes to the

team who've really built something special. If you haven't used it before, making your own links page is a good way to get started: glitch.com/glitch-in-bio 13/14

Glitch: The friendly community where everyone builds the web

Simple, powerful, free tools to create and use millions of apps.

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That's it. Go forth and tumble! I hope you like it. tumbleword.glitch.me/?word=hurrah 14/14 #tumbleword

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5 minutes later and the 🌍 HIGH SCORE 🌎 for 'launch' is 45! #tumbleword

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