Wordfall
A tactical survival word game. Free, no install, plays in a browser.
Letters fall. You swipe adjacent tiles to spell words before the water rises, and the board is trying to kill you the whole time.
The game
You get a 5×5 grid. Letters drop into it from the top, one at a time, every ten seconds. Drag across touching tiles in any of eight directions (no jumping) to spell a word of three letters or more. Valid words vanish, and gravity pulls everything above them back down.
That's the whole verb set. The pressure is what makes it a game.
Your run is ten minutes. The clock doesn't start until you make your first input, so you get a moment to read the board before you commit. After that, a new letter arrives every ten seconds whether you're ready or not. Empty the grid to win. Let it fill and the run ends.
Score is tile sum times length and combo multipliers. Letters have rarity. The common ones (A, E, I, L, N, O, R, S, T, U) are worth a point each, the rare ones (J, Q, X, Z) are worth eight to ten. Long words pay disproportionately, and a streak of five-letter-or-longer plays builds a multiplier that caps at 3×. One nine-letter word with two X's can outscore a run of scruffy three-letter words. That's the decision the game keeps asking you to make.
Then it starts fighting back. Virus tiles invade the grid, and they don't care what you were building. Pearls and hammers are the answer. Buy them with coins, equip them, use them when you need them, not when you want them. It's a shop economy on a timer.
No difficulty modes. One balanced ruleset, tuned for short runs. English and Spanish, switchable in settings.
Why it exists
It started small. I wanted something I could finish before Mother's Day. A puzzle game, because my mom likes puzzle games and the holiday was coming up.
The seed was a game one of my aunts used to play when she was young, back in the 1930s or 40s, before video games were a thing. I don't remember the exact rules. You moved letters around a 9×9 grid to form words as best you could. No scoring system that I recall.
I built from that. The grid shrank to 5×5, a roguelite loop came in, and so on. I had the main loop done by Mother's Day. The game had more in it than planned. I kept building.
How it's built
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Engine | Godot 4.6, GDScript with static typing |
| Backend | Supabase for auth, leaderboards, player state |
| Landing page | React 18 + Vite 5, pnpm workspace, no CSS framework |
| Testing | GUT (engine), Vitest (landing, 80% line threshold), Playwright (staging QA) |
| Deploy | Vercel in production, tag-driven releases via Forgejo Actions |
| Distribution | PWA with service worker and web manifest, no app store |
Web export means the whole thing is WebAssembly. One index.wasm and a .pck payload, served as a static site. No install, no store, no download. That is why a 65-year-old can play without asking for help.
Links
- Play https://wrdfall.xyz/
- More projects https://sp4rklux.xyz/work/