I completed my first playable sketch for the Experimental Gameplay Project ASCII in February challenge. After reading the short brief, the most obvious idea seemed to be to make a game using ASCII to recreate graphics, but given my recent conversion to loving scrabble, I chose to think about word games. A double-switchback of obviousness.

I also wanted to get into Processing a bit more, so this first sketch is a java applet.

Like with Rectangulous I have chosen to make a contemplative toy free of time-limits but with a specific goal.

Performance is not very efficient, but this is the point of the rapid-prototyping methods of the Experimental Gameplay Project. I did improve word lookup speed a bit by splitting the wordlists into separate arrays by initial letter and sorting them by word length offline. I admit it's not graphically advanced or pretty at this point either. However, I think it has some interesting gameplay points, like zero-tolerance of mistakes. It seems to be quite good for practicing certain scrabble skills, especially learning the valid two-letter words and making use of minimal vowels once you start to run out.

Play it here.