I did something weird. I rewrote and updated my old game from 2012, Spwords. Play it here! By the way, it’s open source too.

It was a couple of years ago that I started this rewrite in the Elm programming language. When I made it originally it was without using any of the fancy Javascript frameworks people use these days. My web programming (or really, all of it) was still pretty unsophisticated. I had a collection of utilities back then that tried to imitate the classic OOP style from Actionscript 3 that I was used to with my Flash experience, even. Nowadays I’d much rather have referential transparency than inheritance.

I always liked the little silly game, and knowing the many ways it could be improved, I wanted to try remaking it in a language I actually enjoy writing, as an exercise. I learned a lot in the process!

I remember that back-then fellow tigger Lou Acresti wanted to help me make it playable online (BTW, his Flog game that he submitted to the same compo is amazing), and we tried for a bit, but it was a bit too difficult for me at that time, praise him for his patience. Now, this new version has no online features, in fact it’s barely any better than the old patched together version. It does have difficulty levels, though! Also more commentary variation. And a different color scheme, and better typography. I wanted to at least add sound, and Spanish support (another aborted addition I at some point worked on, for the old version), but didn’t get around to it in the end. So I’m just releasing it now in this slightly underwhelming state, because otherwise I’ll just keep procrastinating on it for who knows how many more years, and it looks sort of cute as a portfolio piece.

On the subject of Elm, I’ve also been using it for an update to this dated WordPress blog that won’t even look right on a smartphone. Part of why I haven’t been writing at all is that it’s not very motivating to add content in its current state. I don’t even feel like showing it. So, I’m using elm-pages to make a static version of it (WIP code’s online). I ran into some limitations in elm-pages v2, obstructing my goal of reproducing most functionality of the current blog, so I’m chipping away at the design while waiting for v3 to have an official release. No promises on when I’ll release it, though.