Trying to design the next Wordle

Five lessons from watching a game creator at work

Would you be able to invent the next Wordle?

David Shariatmadar tried! And learned some fascinating stuff along the way.

Shariatmadari is a writer for The Guardian, and he set himself the task of creating a new word game. He spent weeks beavering away at it, batting around ideas with friends, playtesting options, until eventually he produced the concept — brought to life by Guardian software developers — that you see above: Wordiply. You can play it for free at their site.

The game concept is clever: It gives you a short word, and you’re challenged to think of the longest possible words that contain that smaller word. You have only five tries, and you get more points the longer your successful word is. Like Wordle, you can only play it once a day.

It’s quite clever, and while not quite as addictive as Wordle, it’s awfully fun.

What’s particularly cool, though, is that Shariatmadar wrote a long essay describing the process of designing the game.

Now this: This is gold!

Why? Because to me, game design is one of the most interesting disciplines in existence.