Spelling a pane?

We’ve had a running list of potential new themes for quite some time, and this year we’re sharing some on the site by way of prototype mockups. Today, one of our earliest ideas, featuring panes of stained glass to shine a new light on your game. Instead of joining objects like beans, each game has a random pattern of colored glass where some of the panes are open for letter placement. We didn’t even mark which ones were placeable here as it’s just a proof of concept. Eventually we may highlight the outline of each letter-pane. We did put in green lines here to show the connections, though a final form factor would have less clutter.

Glassworks in progress

This example is certainly not ideal. Some letters are hard to see (that’s a T and N on the right). And it’s not always clear how far each letter-pane extends, or exactly which letters border which. It even caused us to gloof up our own letter placement more than once. We simply offer it here as a rough demo. In the process, we’ll play a little faux-cabulary. They’re made up words with made up meanings for no points, to complement scoring words just for fun. Scoring rules here were standard, though different colors could double points, etc.. This game used the Spell the Beans grade of Blu Yonder (lower screenshot), so it cleaned up with big points on big words. Faux-cabulary follows.

Stained glass game user mockup with lines showing connections

Gloof: A glaring gaffe: My monumental gloof was there for all to see.
Kitade: Refreshing juice made from kiwis and kumquats: Nothing like a tall glass of kitade to start the day or wash away the ignominy of an oafish gloof.
Degrant: To revoke something granted: Permission to expunge your gloof degranted. You didn’t share your kitade.

What a drag

Narge: (verb/noun) When trying to drag and drop, etc., on a computer, reaching the edge of the desk with the mouse and awkwardly trying to reach the screen drop location, pawing with the mouse without lifting up: Narging is a hit-or-miss affair with me, leading to the occasional mini-gloof.
Hff: (Interjection) Pfft: Narging? Hff. Just right-click. What a gloofer.

Stained glass game Blu Yonder mockup
Like a good independent app, Blu Yonder’s longest word (56 points) was nonaffiliated.

Godetail: A pheasant-like Eurasian bird: Though it’s not unusual to see a godetail scurrying across a quiet country road in the north this time of year, the city is an entirely different story.
Tailiff: (often British) A private investigator, especially one monitoring a subject’s activities.
Gannot: One of a variety of drafting tools.
Tedhog: The offspring of a teddy bear and a groundhog: The use of tedhogs for weather prognostication was discontinued after the cuddly but unreliable animals were found to inevitably sleep through the entire month of February.

Disappointed fans waiting in vain on Tedhog Day, 1982
Eager fans wait in vain for Taxahachee Ted in 1982. Two were treated for frostbite.

 

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