Wordle by Josh Wardle is currently (as of January 2022!) the hottest game on the internet. If you haven’t played, I suggest you go and do so, and I’ll see you back here in a minute when you’ve acquired a new addiction!
I got hooked on it in mid January, and on a walk home I thought that it would be fairly simple to write a version for the ZX Spectrum.
Whilst it wasn’t quite as simple as I was expecting, I knocked a rudimentary version out in a couple of hours and spent another few days polishing it and generally fiddling with the code.
It’s not exactly ground breaking, but it finally fulfils an ambition that I have had for thirty-odd years – to build and release an actual computer game.
It’s pretty faithful to the original, although it doesn’t look much like it. The biggest omission is the ability to put in made-up words, as I didn’t leave enough space for a full dictionary. It still has 1,000 words to play with so it will keep you going for a while – and there’s the other difference; you can go through several words in once sitting instead of one per day!
Feel free to download it and let me know what you think! I expect I’ll update it as people find bugs and I improve the code, but now I’ve got my feet wet I feel like diving into the world of 8-bit coding!
If you don’t have vintage hardware to hand, try out QAOP or Fuse to play it, in your browser at ZX Basic DB.