Letter Rip!
A Progressive Web App word game: drag across letter tiles to spell words before the stack reaches the top.
On an iPhone, open the app's link in Safari and tap Share → Add to Home Screen. It then runs full-screen and works offline. A game in progress is saved on the device, so you can leave and resume.
Playing
- The board is 6 columns wide and 11 rows tall. A game starts with 3 rows of letters at the bottom.
- Touch a letter and drag through touching tiles (sideways, up, down or diagonally) to spell a word of 3 or more letters. Slide back to undo a letter. Let go to play it.
- A real word scores the sum of its tiles' Scrabble values. Its tiles disappear and the tiles above them drop down.
- A new row of letters falls onto the stack every 12 seconds at first, a quarter-second sooner after each row, down to every 5 seconds. If any column is full when a new row arrives, the game is over.
- Letters are drawn like a Scrabble bag (98 tiles, no blanks). When the bag runs out it's refilled.
- Sounds: each letter you pick plays a blip that climbs the scale, a real word plays a rising chime (longer for longer words), and a miss plays a "wah-wah". They're synthesized in the browser, so there are no audio files. Tap the speaker in the top right to turn them off. On an iPhone they follow the silent switch and don't stop music you're playing.
Words
words.txt is the public-domain ENABLE word list (the one many word games use), limited to words of 3 or more letters.
Developing
Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, no build step.
node serve.js
then open http://localhost:8082. When you change any app file, bump CACHE in sw.js so installed copies pick up the update.
The icons are cut from the artwork in tools/icon-source.webp by tools/make-icons.ps1 (Windows, pwsh tools/make-icons.ps1). To use new artwork, replace that file and update the crop position at the top of the script.
