A Call For Crossword Makers

[6731292a8bc3cicemann]

Greetings.

As mentioned in the "What are you making?" thread over on TTLG. I'm in the beginning stages of developing a game which features crosswords as it's main game mechanic. To that end I'd like to have 100+ levels in the game. Only trouble being that putting even one crossword takes some time with fitting words within the letters of adjoining words etc etc. So this is a call for assistance from you all, as with your help I'll get to that 100+ level amount sooner.

All you'll need to do is create a crossword in the editor I'll supply and just pm me back with the .dat file which the levels are saved as. Its all quite simple really. Only requirements will be:

So the rules:

* Keep it family friendly with the words
* Stick to Scrabble / Upwords rules with the words. So no use of "the" or "its" and no abbreviated words (eg TV) or slang.
* Try and make use of every letter of the alphabet when possible. Since the letters given to players will be randomized.

I've got 10 levels done so far (5 from me, 5 from the wife). The more I can have in the better.

Full credit (in the games credits and readme) will be given to any who take the time to do any. If need be I'll do them all myself which is fine. Thinking of good words to put in that fit within other words and that make use of unused (as of that point) letters is the time consuming part. So the more I have available, the quicker I can get onto the coding of the actual game itself. Just wanting to have atleast 100 available before I jump into that, as the rules of the game will be super simple.

You can grab the level editor - Here

Controls:

Mouse - Left click to add tiles, right click to remove them.

Keyboard:

C - Change layer (currently toggles between layers 0 and 1)
D - Delete all tiles on all layers and reset current level back to default size
k - Save map under a specific name.
H - Hide/Enable information status bars
M - Bring up editor menu - From here you can do some other features (eg save as, create new level etc etc).
R - Reload Level from last saved version
S - Save currently loaded map
< - Back one texture in current layer
> - Forward one texture in current layer
[ - Decrement Current Level displayed
] - Increment Current Level displayed
Space - Place texture/Object at current mouse position

If you run into any problems let me know either here, or via PM and I'll assist. Editor can be a bit confusing to use at first but will make sense once you get how it works. The games going to end up looking something like:

Image: http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/fc28/gsdm19fqydq7uwbzg.jpg?size_id=5

So yeah. Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

[6731292a8be18Kolya]

I haven't looked at your editor yet, since I'm at work.

I think how professional crossword creation software generally works is that you pass it a dictionary (a few thousand words + description) and it can then calculate as many crosswords from that pool as you like. Which is why (especially short) words tend repeat, if you're doing the same crossword in a newspaper every week.

[6731292a8bfb9icemann]

I'll definitely consider doing something along those lines at a later point, but for now I'm going with set crosswords. The more I have the more variety there will be. A random one will get picked from the list of crossword levels each time the player starts up another game.

Certainly if the game itself generated new crosswords each time that'd be the ultimate way to ensure new results every time, but a computer can never replicate that thinking that goes on when a human does it. Sure you can set it rules to go by, but you'd likely get quite different results. Plus with the challenge of trying to make sure of every letter in the alphabet (or as close to) gets used that'd add an extra difficulty for a computer + placement of words.

That said it'd be do-able, just very time consuming coding wise (in theory), and I'm going more for a quick project type thing with this one. More want to speed through it while all the ideas are fresh in my mind. Only started this project 3 days ago.

[6731292a8c2c8Olfred]

My initial thought would also have been to just use auto generated crosswords.
Ideally, maybe, a database with description and (fitting) words, and everytime a description gets used up it will be ticked off. This way you could have repeating words but not repeating descriptions.
And if you don't want the full random you could use the generator to generate one and check for yourself if you like it. If you like it, save it and tick off the descriptions.