[ad_1]
With so many people routinely putting their daily results from the viral word-guessing game Wordle on social media, the influx of near-identical collections of green and yellow boxes has gotten a little tedious. Some users are getting more creative about celebrating their successes, turning their Wordle results into paintings, soft sculpture, or digital art. But it takes a certain amount of time, obsession, and skill to convert your Wordle score into a berry pie. Now an Estonian programmer has published a simple, easy-to-use free tool that uses Wordle’s own social-media function to convert play results into beautiful little animated houses via a city-design program called Townscaper.
Townscaper, which the developer describes on Steam as “‘more of a toy than a game,” lets users build elaborate fantasy villages through a simple point-and-click interface. The Wordle-to-Townscaper tool is even simpler: After finishing a Wordle game, click the “Share” button to automatically load your results into your clipboard, then paste them into the “tweet contents” box on the Wordle-to-Townscaper page, click “parse” to interpret them, and “generate” for a link to follow to the results.
Image: Tarno Annus via Townscaper and Reporter Door
These little houses are interactive: You can click and drag to move the camera and change the angle. They’re also gently animated, with ripples in the water and resident birds that, over time, will move from one roof to another. There’s a meditative calmness to Townscaper
creations, and this tool personalizes them with little effort. You can even make up your own patterns by clicking on the parsed boxes in the tool to change their colors, then generate new houses with your results.
The developer, Tarmo Annus, who goes by @Tarmo888 on Twitter and Tumblr, tells Reporter Door he got the idea when he saw Townscaper dev Oskar Stålberg joking online about possibly requesting this kind of tool from Wordle. Tarmo says he found an existing Github library that would convert Javascript objects, or JSONs — in this case, Wordle’s green-and-yellow boxes — to a format that Townscaper would accept. “Converting the objects to [that] string was the most difficult part, and luckily, it was already solved,” he says.
From there, he added options that could parse Wordle’s grey or black boxes in different ways depending on user input — you can check boxes to fill in empty spaces, or ground spaces, so you don’t wind up with a house on stilts, in case that offends your sensibilities for some reason.
Tarmo does think it’s possible that Wordle being sold to The New York Times will end people’s easy access to and interest in the game. He says he doesn’t blame Wordle creator Josh Wardle for selling it off, but he suspects the move to the Times could kill users’ interest in the game if the company changes access to it or how it operates. As long as they use the same functionality, he says, his tool should continue to work. But if the Times does radically alter Wordle , he invites other programmers to play with the tool. “If somebody decides to make Wordle [with] 6-letter words and 7 attempts, my tool can be easily modified,” he tells Reporter Door. “It’s open-source, just like the library I used.” The code can be found on Github.
[ad_2]