[jessecoleman]

Like others in the comments, I also used my pandemic free time to build a game. building a prototype took me a long weekend, but the long tail of adding state management, mobile responsiveness and animations etc has dwarfed the initial development time.

It quickly went from a fun playground for experimenting with mechanics to a long term project. It's been a great learning experience, and still a lot of fun to work on. But the pure creative joy of concepting and building has been supplanted with the tedium of maintenance and bug fixing.

My game for those interested: https://gramjam.app

[josh-sematic]

Fun premise! I will note that the dictionary is not as complete as I might hope—it didn’t recognize “tasers,” and there was one other word it rejected that I thought it would get (forgot what it was though). Still, a fun game!

[jessecoleman]

https://www.anagrammer.com/scrabble/tasers

You'll find a lot of variation between dictionaries. I was surprised to discover that curating the dictionary is one of the hardest aspects of building a word game. People have a lot of opinions on what should or should not be included, I've spent a lot of time manually filtering out profane and questionable words. Another interesting constraint of this particular game is that unlike Scrabble there's a lot of accidental word discovery, which can create a poor user experience if a bunch of obscure words clear and ruin a player's intended word.

P.S. I will probably add tasers after you flagged it