Wildcards, Numbers, & More!

Hi! Hazel here. I'm the second half of the team working on Pronoun Palace. While Cadence plugs away at the art and design, I work on the tricky technical stuff behind the scenes that brings everything together.

Last newsletter, we talked about spells and the depth of choices they provide to the player. This time, let's narrow in on one of the most versatile concepts we alluded to last time: Wildcards!

The traditional wildcard found in Scrabble and other word games is a tile with a blank face that can be used as any letter and has no value. In the context of Scrabble, that makes sense; you need to represent a wildcard with a single physical piece and you couldn't possibly indicate all the possible letters and values.

But we're making a video game. And isn't it more fun when the letter matters?

Take a look at Freezer, one of the midgame enemies you might encounter. Freezer applies the frozen effect to two tiles on your board, which makes them count for both defense and damage. More importantly, it converts those tiles into wildcards!

It might seem strange for an enemy to give you such powerful tiles, but there's a catch. It deals a relentless six damage every turn! That's a lot more than you could handle with the steady trickle of plastic tiles you get naturally.

In this fight, a key feature of wildcards comes to light: A wildcard will always become the strongest letter possible.

Originally, this was where it ended; wildcards can be anything and they take on the value and appearance of the letter they represent. It took a bit of work, but I found a way to efficiently search our dictionary for the strongest word that matched a particular configuration of wildcards, and I made a compilation script to sort our dictionary optimally for that search. Then I implemented the visual display for the tile face and value changing, and updated spells to charge with wildcard faces. A satisfying and optimized implementation of a neat feature we'd never seen done this way before.

But... why stop there? We have this whole system. Imagine the possibilities if we made it just a little more complex.

Introducing the second kind of wildcard: numbers! If you’ve seen a phone keypad before, you’re probably able to guess how they work. The more balanced cousin of wildcards, they can only be used as one of 3–4 letters, neatly displayed on the tile face beneath the number.

Prole Service alternates between launching a bunch of numbers onto the board and whacking you for big damage. Once again, using your wildcards optimally is key!

Woof, that’s a lot of wildcards. Maybe we could take a look at something simpler.

That’s not simpler.

It’s hard to talk about the technical challenges with wildcards without mentioning the other face effect in the room. Shimmering tiles have two faces, and every permutation of shimmering tiles must form a valid word. For instance, a B/C shimmering tile could be used to spell “bats” and “cats” simultaneously.

If you have experience optimizing code, the word “permutations” might alarm you. Suddenly, we’re not just checking the validity of one word, but two, or four, or sixteen… Then you realize that a wildcard that works just fine for one word might not work for another. Try multiplying the possibility space by up to 26. Per wildcard. And then you have to find the strongest possible configuration, on top of that!

The obvious solution would be to just make the wildcard blank. Maybe it can just be a different letter for every word. It’s kind of niche edge case, does it really matter… ?

So obviously we weren’t going to do those. I spent several days coming up with a system to narrow the possibility space for each wildcard and to rule out invalid permutations of wildcards as quickly as possible. The word solver went from locking up completely in the most complex cases to taking seconds, then milliseconds.

Now, it just works.

That’s the beauty of wildcards in Pronoun Palace; they just work. It’s fun to just throw them into a word and see what the game gives you! Maybe you’ll even learn some new words along the way.

And if you thought we’d stop at numbers…

You don’t know us.

Next time, Cadence will be back to talk about the game’s beautiful art direction! You don’t wanna miss it!