Built this in 24 hours with 3 other friends as a part of an on campus Yahoo hackathon. We just finished working on the game, so it likely has many bugs. The game is built with html5, and the backend uses now.js. This works on the computer, iPad, iPhone, and Android devices. I am very tired right now, so going to leave this running, and go sleep! Game inspired by Wordament on WP7.
You can use the keyboard to type out the words. There are a few bugs with that but it might be much easier. The game figures out which letters you want to use as you keep typing. Just press enter when you are done typing out the word.
It seems like you might not be properly escaping user input for their name by the looks of the leader board which is now popping up a window with a dude getting slapped in the face with a projectile.
So far there has been several GIF's embedded. An alert for your document.cookie, and a redirect to another gif. You can safely say it's not escaping the HTML input on the leader board.
Also the matching words shouldn't be passed to the client, keep as much data server side as possible to elevate some of the cheating, your never going to stop all of it but that should deter most people.
All in all though kudos, looks a decent outcome for a hack project.
"the matching words shouldn't be passed to the client, keep as much data server side"
Communication cost between clients and server would be too high I guess. Also you would notice the delay between entering a word and getting the reply from the server.
Sorry I knew this was going to happen, but wanted to throw it up on here before I went to sleep. Now I have gotten such a huge response, that I am trying to fix it :)
That was me taking down the server for a few seconds. I have done some more sanitization for now, but will likely do a much more thorough sanitization when I get the chance later.
Nice job - it's addicting and fun! But I agree that diagonal can sometimes be frustrating - I had to do it very carefully, which made me slower.
Also, I was hoping there would be more to it - like an all-time high list, or something like that. I'm not sure how you would structure it, but I think some kind of stored history would make me want to come back and play again.
Thanks- its great to hear that you enjoyed it. I am trying to fix some of the xss and injection problems with the game right now. I plan on adding high scores and polishing this game up!
Hey, I'm one of the other devs. I just emailed farhadabas a fix to the diagonal selection issue, so as soon as he wakes up, he'll update it. Thanks for the feedback!
Sorry for the xss- knew it was a problem but thought I would fix it later after I got some sleep. I have done some basic sanitization for now, and will likely make it much better later. I have also increased the time limit to 2 minutes.
I generate the letters based on the frequency of the letters in the English language. I just do this process many times, and then use the board with the most words. Its a very hacky brute force way :)
I am working on a similar boggle clone for facebook (there is none for my main language).
What did you use for the server side? First I started with a Java server with sockets but I noticed that it does not work behind the firewalls and now I am using PHP as a messenger between the java server and flash client. Since flash is now only doing HTTP requests it should be fine with firewalls.
Also did you pregenerate the boards? I generated some but they are not very good.
Is this you? (https://twitter.com/#!/farhadabas) Was wondering if it was. If so, I'm gonna follow you so I can see what future projects you come up with. I try and keep up with new HTML5 stuff.
Maybe its just my ignorance but I have no idea how to play this. From a user experience perspective I see that I can click on letters to make them turn red and spin, and sometimes they turn orange but I have no idea what the point is.
Thanks for bringing the Opera issue to our attention.
As for the name input prompt, it's true that we could've done something better, but to be fair, this was our first time working with nowjs/nodejs and HTML5/javascript (my first time with HTML5/javascript and I was doing the UI).
i'm trying on chrome and not getting points for words (are those tallied at the end of a session)...it's not clear and at least in my browser it shows 0 points. great job
tip, pit, sit, tit, git, tar, rat ... 2 and 3 letter words should really be excluded. They make the game boring. Great stuff otherwise, really enjoyed playing it. Thanks.
