I have a new web game live. It’s called Iconfound. It’s a simple word-based web game, in the category of games like Wordle. The objective is deciphering five 5-letter words related to a daily theme (something apparently called a “Cryptoquiz”).

This was a small personal project, created with Don and Mike Citarella from ERA404. They came up with the idea, and I implemented the web client.

I say “small” because, well, it is a small, simple game. However, it took over a year to finish! This was a personal project implemented during many late nights, and around a newborn. So you can imagine.

Technology wise, there’s not a lot of surprises. It’s a simple React-based game with the basics (TypeScript, Sass, Webpack, etc). But as is my standard approach, I used the project as an excuse to experiment and play with a few different solutions; I rolled my own Local Storage-based collection of state management hooks, for example.

All in all, the result is a small, PWA-ish game application.

It’s not a game I do very well with, mind you. It’s certainly the brain child of Don and Mike in that regard; it’s pretty challenging to me. It certainly takes a certain skill to play it well: being able to conjure potential words out of a few letters. The same sort of skills that makes one a great Scrabble player, I’d say.

As a side note, I like to believe my English vocabulary is superb, and indeed, above average. I think I know a lot of words. But that’s not exactly the same thing as coming up with them, given partial hints.

Come to think of it, I’ve always loved playing cryptograms in Portuguese. However, after playing Iconfound quite a lot, I now think solving cryptograms in Portuguese is very different from solving them in English. Words in Portuguese follow some hard patterns (for example, “M” can only come before a “P” or “B”, otherwise it has to be an “N”; double letters can only be “S” or “R”; etc). This means that solving cryptograms in Portuguese is much more clue-focused than it is in English, which is a lot looser (as it uses a lot more borrowed or adapted words). And my strength is in gathering and following clues, not conjuring word candidates with very few letters.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s not a game for everyone. Still, it’s one I’m very proud of, and very happy with the result.

Hope you enjoy it!