The first game that I’d like to create with the game engine that I [wrote about yesterday][/posts/2025-03-19-patina] is a game I’m calling “Bookworm”. The plan is for it to be Snake, but with a twist
Specifically, the core mechanic is that instead of a snake eating apples, the player is a worm eating letters to create words. I took a moment last night to sketch out what the game might look like:
In Summary
The player starts out like in any snake clone, with a head and no tail. Instead of seeing apples, the player sees letters they can eat. As they eat those letters, a few things can happen:
- If the letter contributes to part of an existing word in the English dictionary, the player’s tail increases in size, and they will see the partial word dangle behind them as the move around the map.
- If the letter eaten completes a known word, the player scores points, loses their tail and has to find a new word. The size of their head also increases depending on the length of the word they found.
- If the letter eaten would prevent the player from spelling a known word, they not only lose their tail, but their head shrinks by a size of one.
- If ever the player would shrink to a head size less than one, they lose the game and their score is recorded.
Questionable Details
Hopefully, the above all makes sense, but there are a few details one might be curious about.
- How big is the game board?
- In my research, I’ve seen claims of boards for snake games being as small as 10x10 and as large as 40x40. For the initial version, I’m going to experiment with the smaller board size and increase it later. I may even make it configurable by the player!
- What dictionary will you use?
-
For prototyping, I’ll just use the word file that comes with most *nix
based systems which is located at
/usr/share/dict/words. Eventually though, I’ll want something more curated and sophisticated. For instance, I’d like to eliminate offensive words, and perhaps work with a more feature-rich dictionary which includes parts-of-speech and definitions, which I can use to design more game modes.
In Excess
I also thought of a few ideas for different modes of play.
Stem-ulation
The score is based on how many consecutive words you can create with the same word stem. Perhaps the head you retain is based on that stem. For example, If you spell “cat” first, followed by “catholic”, your head might then become 3 units long, spelling “cat”.
Worml
You only score 5-letter words.
Part-y of Speech
You are prompted with a part of speech (e.g., noun, adjective, verb, etc.) and must spell a word that can be used as that part of speech.