About Wordiculum

Meet the Developer

I’m Gordon Smith, Principal Production Engineer at Pektron with 25 years of experience developing processes. Wordiculum is my passion project—a game that combines my love for words and coding.

The idea for this game came after a games night when we played a popular game that I won't name drop in case I get sued. If I enjoy a board game I always think about the mechanics and think "hey I could code that". Usually I code it (in Python), really enjoy the problem solving nature of making it work, and then file it away under "fun but pointless projects". Sometimes rather than just re-creating the game I will create helper tools to make the game better or less easy to mess up (eg logical deduction games are prone to players broadcasting incorrect information by mistake so I made a tool for Cryptid that helps with that).

This time I really just wanted something to use to measure how many out of all possible words in a 4 x 4 letter grid I could find using the [game name redacted] rules. In a 3 minutes competitive game between friends you find maybe 20 words, then juggle the dice and start again. I was curious how many more words than the found words there were. That lead to a basic script that can in the command line find all the words, let you enter words, check they were valid, count them all up and give you a result like "you found 15 out of 94 possible words".

I was pretty happy with that and then forgot all about it as usual. Skip forward a year and I discovered that there are actually ways to code things in Python and not have the GUI look like Windows 95 is having a bad hair day. Big props to Eel, Flet, and Streamlit for opening my eyes to the obvious answer: let Python do the numbers while HTML, JS, and CSS handle making it look pretty (or in the case of Flet, pass it over to Flutter). Wait... Flutter is used to build Android apps. OMG I COULD BUILD AN ANDROID APP! Me, a hobbyist coder who gave up trying to code for Android when I couldn't even do "hello world".

So I needed something to try out this Flet platform on. Something that would suit a phone screen, that might be fun to play, and that I might actually get to a level of quality where I could face letting other people use it. I took that [name redacted] clone code and threw it into AI and said "hey do you know Flet? Make this command line code into something visual." I totally expected it not to work at all, but you know what—it only 50% didn't work, which was great because problem solving is fun. Especially when you can be really rude to the AI and criticise it for not spotting the obvious reason their code didn't work. Oh, what larks!

After not very long I had something that did everything the command line version did but looked pretty. I could have stopped there, I should have stopped there. But I didn't. I kept finding things to add, actively encouraged feature creep—expanding the scope way beyond what the client (me) had asked for (everything) and paid for (nothing). It was still just my little game that I made a little bit better every day. But one day I thought maybe this is good enough to let my nearest and dearest see it. Maybe I could be brave and let some friends see it? Nope... must be perfect before anyone can see it. Queue more refinement and then eventually I had something I was happy with.

When I finally "let go" I knew it must have been pretty good because my friends and family were actually playing it... for fun... by choice... and making suggestions... and talking about it... not just tolerating another one of my little autistic projects. So I started an unsolicited WhatsApp group and pushed it on more people. And somehow we have got from there to my putting it on the Play Store—for free, with no ads, no tracking, or any of the other crap that enshittifies modern life. It's just a game I made to see if I could.

UnMeet the Developer

God, did you really read any of that? Well, each to their own but personally I couldn't care less what my bloody back story is.

If you are still here and you're not finding this irritating and self-indulgent, then you must be a lot less judgemental than I am. You should probably work on that. Embrace it... but if you are still reading, then here's some preachy crap that will really drive you off. I'm giving this game away for free. Give your money to people who need it.

GiveWell tells you where your money will do the most good. Penny for penny, if you donate to the causes they suggest, you will achieve the most positive change. No offense, but screw the donkey sanctuary.

Unicef deserves your money. World Central Kitchen deserves your money. Trussell Trust deserves your money. The Red Cross deserves your money.

And I don't think I would be allowed back on Pektron property if I didn't mention Rainbows Hospice. They are a local charity that provides care and support to children with life-limiting conditions and their families. They are a fantastic charity, and Pektron has been supporting them generously for years.

That's the end of the preachy bit. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.