👈 Back to all posts

✏ Toppled v1.2 - Better golden words!

It’s time for another Toppled update and just like before here’s a quick update list for those in a rush:

The first main change is that there’s now a nice new splash screen when you open up the game. This screen changes depending on the status of the player - if you have a streak for example: it will tell you how many days you’ve accumulated. If you’re a new player you’ll have a button for the instructions to learn how to play.

Speaking of the instructions… previously the instructions was just a big wall of text. This meant that a fair few players just glossed over them and didn’t pick up some of the important functions (like being able to delete a word).

Now however, the instructions have been completely reworked. Instead of a wall of text, players can now see a selection of slides that showcase how the game works along with visual examples. Players press next button to progress through the instructions so that hopefully all the bases are covered.

Existing players can still see these new instructions by pressing the question mark icon at the top of the game.

The big fix: better golden words!

In this update the golden words should now make a lot more sense. To help clarify things a little, allow me to briefly explain:

Every day the wall is built using the letters from four randomly chosen words. These are the golden words.

Previously, the four golden words were chosen from a giant list of all the valid words in the game. A list of 11,286 words to be precise!

This meant that the golden words were often quite obscure words, words that you wouldn’t necessarily use on a daily basis like: yrneh, sloyd, or ossia. Valid words, just very obscure and hard to guess.

That's now all changed

In this latest update I’ve painstakingly gone through the list of 11,286 words and selected the words that I know, or the words that I at least recognised and checked against their definition. (Read the end section if you’re interested to know how I did sorted the words).

The game now uses this much smaller list of 4899 words to choose four golden words at random.

Hopefully what this means is that players will have more of a fair chance of figuring out the golden words.

Note: Players can still guess words like yrneh, sloyd, and ossia - they are still valid words in the eyes of the game, but they won’t ever be golden words.

Shout out to all the players who suggested I make the golden words more curated.

That’s it for the update! Thanks to all the players who are giving Toppled a go. If you have any feedback or comments just send me an email.

How I sorted the list of words

To sort through the list of 11,286 words I set up a simple web page that displayed one word at a time.

To make sure I could leave the process and come back to it later I used the browser’s localStorage to save the index of the word I was up to and it would also save the sorted words list too.

Then it was just a case of sitting there and processing each word one by one which suprisingly didn’t take too much time.