'Dartwords' is new word game inspired by 'Wordle' and 'Clippy'
What's the story
The Game Band, the studio behind the popular game Blaseball, has launched a new daily word game called Dartwords. The game's creator Sam Rosenthal was inspired by his childhood experiences of playing word games with family during road trips. He wanted to create something similar in the digital space and thus came up with Dartwords. The game is now available on the web.
Gameplay
How to play Dartwords
Dartwords is a word guessing game where players have 10 tries to guess a secret word each day.
The game starts without any hints, and players can type in any word.
A character named Darty then provides clues based on the guess. For example, if you guess an animal, Darty might say it's bigger or manmade.
Each guess brings the player closer to the correct answer as represented by a dart hitting a board on screen.
Unique approach
Custom hint engine using local LLM
Unlike other word games, Dartwords wants to be "more conversational." To achieve this, The Game Band created a custom hint engine using a local LLM trained on the English dictionary.
Darty's clues are a mix of broader hints from the LLM and developer-written clues as players get closer to their answer.
Rosenthal said, "It's this interesting mixture of using hand-authored work and local models to get us to where we want to be."
Game design
Rosenthal hopes the system will improve over time
Dartwords stands out from traditional word games with its open-ended nature, which can be daunting at first.
However, as players get used to the game's hints, they can improve their performance over time.
Rosenthal hopes that as more people play Dartwords, the system will get better and better and provide better clues.
He said, "Over time, with more people playing the game, our system will get better and better and hopefully serve better clues."
Character design
Darty is one of the most unique aspects of Dartwords
Darty, a sentient dart with big eyes and tiny hands, is one of the most unique aspects of Dartwords.
Rosenthal said Darty was inspired by Clippy. He wanted to give Dartwords a more conversational feel and make it charming and fun.
"We want this game to feel charming and fun," Rosenthal added.