Most word games put the score in a corner. A number, maybe a small progress bar, sitting off to the side while the actual game happens somewhere else. Have Words doesn't have that corner. The score is the biggest thing on the screen. It is the background.
Most word games put the score in a corner. A number, maybe a small progress bar, sitting off to the side while the actual game happens somewhere else. Have Words doesn’t have that corner. The score is the biggest thing on the screen. It is the background.
A while back I went to MoMA and couldn’t stop thinking about the look of the place. The giant bold type, the flat slabs of color, the hard edges, nothing decorative anywhere. I came home insufferable about it for a few weeks and decided the game should feel like that. Big blocks of color, type doing the work, no clutter.
Then I had to work out what the big blocks of color actually were. You can’t just paint a word game and call it design. If color was going to be the loudest thing on the screen, it should do something, so I handed it the biggest job in the game. The blocks are the score.
The screen is two flat blocks of color, one per player, and the line where they meet is the score. When you’re ahead, your block is bigger. When you’re losing, it’s a sliver. That’s the whole scoreboard. You can glance at it and know who’s winning without reading anything.
The darker band on that middle line is the pot, the stuff both players have bet on the current round. It gets wider as the round goes.
The two edges of the band are a little forecast. The near edge is where the line moves to if you lose. The far edge is where it moves to if you win. So you can see what’s on the table before you do anything. When the round’s over, the winner’s color slides out to its edge, and the band shrinks back to a line.
The word you’re building sits across that line, growing from both ends as you each add letters. So a game called Have Words mostly looks like two people pulling on a rope. I’m fine with that.
The screen I worry about most is match point, when one player is way ahead and the other is down to a strip. If I can hand that to someone who’s never seen the game and they can get a pretty good idea for the state of the game, it’s working. If they can’t, I’ve got more to do.
There’s more to get into on the design, the type, the color rules, my firm rule about never rounding a corner, but that’s another post.
More from the build as I go. If you want to know when Have Words ships, the list is at havewords.games.
