About the Project

Ling was inspired by two key ideas: the simple yet addictive nature of Wordle and the vast, interconnected knowledge of a Wikipedia-style game. We wanted to create a word-related game that was not only fun but also a learning experience, focusing on helping people improve their English language skills. The concept of moving from a source word to a target word by exploring synonyms, antonyms, and definitions seemed like a natural fit for this goal.

What We Learned

Throughout the development process, we learned a great deal about API integration and game mechanics. While working with APIs, we realized that they are not perfect. The data retrieval process, especially when building a large interconnected graph of words, required handling errors, data inconsistencies, and optimization challenges. This experience taught us how to better manage API dependencies and to be more flexible with the limitations they impose.

How We Built It

We built Ling using a modern stack:

• Vue for the front-end framework, which provided us with the flexibility to create an intuitive user interface.
  
• Vite as our build tool, helping us maintain a fast and efficient development workflow.
  
• Supabase APIs to handle the backend services and word data, ensuring smooth interactions between the player and the game engine.

Challenges We Faced

One of the most significant challenges was creating the core gameplay mechanics. Building the game meant constructing a large, dynamic graph from the source word, where each node represented a related word (synonym, antonym, or definition term). This process, combined with frequent API calls, proved to be both time-consuming and resource-intensive. We had to optimize both the structure of the graph and the flow of the game to ensure the experience was smooth for players.

Despite these hurdles, we are proud of how Ling turned out and excited to see how players interact with the game to expand their English vocabulary in a fun way.

NOTE: we forked our project from a template repo. As of writing this note the fork origin is private and we cannot access it

Built With

• apis
• netlify
• supabase
• typescript
• vite
• vue