Doctor Whordle Debugging

[purplecat]

Is there is anyone out there who has played Doctor Whordle and doesn't mind risking losing their game history?

I tried to do something clever which involved displaying a message next time anyone opened up the game (to explain I'd moved from five to six letter words). Unfortunately this change runs slightly differently in the deployment environment than in the development environment. The upshot is that I can't view Doctor Whordle at all in the browser I normally play in. I've changed the code so the message no longer messes around with the local storage in the browser, but I've no way of checking if this has fixed the problem. It looks fine on every device where I've not played the game before, but I've only that one where I was keeping state and it still won't display at all on that.

So if there is anyone out there who's prepared to take the risk, can you open up Doctor Whordle - refresh the page if it isn't showing you a six letter word to guess and tell me if still works or if I seem to have broken it for existing players.

https://louiseadennis.github.io/doctor-whordle/

Comments

[purplecat]

Thanks a lot, you've been a star and I was able to go to bed last night without fretting I'd completely broken people's game experience.

I have fixed the spelling errors as well.

Byrdle (which is a choral music themed wordle clone) did 6 letters with 7 guesses and I never lost it, and only had to use the 7th row twice, and the answer was not infrequently the name of a composer I had never heard of, so I think 6 letters and 7 guesses is actually a lot easier than 5 letters and 6 guesses - my hypothesis is that having six letters per guess lets you probe through the alphabet a lot faster, even if there are more places in the word each letter could go. Anyway, that's why you don't get an extra guess with 6 letters.

I'm not tracking any stats on the game, too much like hard work. So I'd be happy to see you test in other browsers if you have the energy to do so - I have fired up Firefox and run through it once, but I've not tried in Opera.

[shivver]

You are welcome! I'm always up for helping test a friend's software, so feel free to hit me up any time.

After I made the suggestion, I thought of a number of ways that more guesses would either be easier or harder, so yes, I agree with you, staying at 6 guesses is better.

I'll take a look on Monday (when I'm on my work computer where I have FF and Opera installed). I may also throw the other analyst on my team at it - I'm training him up and this might be a nice fun exercise in analytical thinking.

[purplecat]

Thanks!