Creative Coding: Unabridged (Anagram Game)

“Unabridged” means text that isn’t shortened, and it has the word “bridge” in it.

So obviously it’s the perfect name for a game where you anagram longer and longer words to build a bridge across a ravine before a train falls off the end. Obviously!

A ten-letter word is long enough to span the ravine and allow the train to pass. You begin with three letters and get a new letter each turn. You have to anagram a new, longer word each turn. An example is shown in the title animation of the game:

A fun challenge making the game was seeing what ten-letter words exist that are made up of potential three, four, five, six, seven, eight and nine-letter words. I had to write a separate program to iterate through 7,843 ten-letter words in the dictionary, remove a letter, check for valid nine-letter words, take away another letter, look for valid eight-letter words, etc. etc.

There are only 61 valid ten-letter words, but the variations of the shorter words makes for 3,895 combinations (i.e. unique game plays.)

Below is some sample game play. It was also fun to animate the explosion if the train drives off the bridge.

It gets progressively harder to make the longer words. I wrote the game and my success rate is less than 5%. Try it for yourself… if you dare!