🌧️ WORD RAIN

Words fall out of the sky — type them before they hit the ground

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Score
0
Level
1
Lives
3
Best
0

⚙️ Set it up

Start wherever you like, and race on the everyday words or on a Classical Roots lesson. Pick one book, then tick as many lessons as you want.

↑ and ↓ change it while you play

⌨️ Controls

  • Just start typing — no need to pick a word first
  • ↑ faster  •  ↓ slower — change the level whenever you like
  • BACKSPACE rub out a letter
  • SPACE give up on this word and start another
  • ENTER new game  •  ESC pause
  • 🎮 Xbox controller? Not this one, sorry — this game is about typing letters, and a controller has no letters on it. Every other game takes a pad.

🎯 How to play

  • Type a word and it vanishes. Let one touch the ground and it costs you a life.
  • You never choose a word — the letters do it for you. Type c and every word starting with c lights up.
  • The one with the line under it is the one you are on: always the lowest that still matches.
  • Three lives. Three words on the ground and the rain has won.

📈 It gets faster

  • Every six words you clear takes you up a level.
  • Each level the words fall faster and arrive closer together.
  • Too slow or too easy? Press ↑ or ↓ and change it yourself, mid-game.
  • Nobody lasts for ever. The question is how far you get.

📚 Your own word lists

  • Under the sky you can swap the everyday words for a Classical Roots lesson.
  • Pick one book, then tick as many lessons as you want.
  • Long words are given proportionally longer to fall, so a vocabulary lesson is a fair game and not an impossible one.
  • Your book, your lessons and your starting level are all remembered.

🧑‍💻 For young coders: build this game yourself

This game is split into small library files inside funtime/lib/, and every function has a comment saying exactly what goes in, what comes out, and the algorithm in plain English. Empty any function out, read its comment, and write it yourself.

File What it does Good functions to try re-writing
lib/wordfall-rules.js The rules: the falling, the matching, the levels speedForLevel, matchingWord, typeLetter, zapWord
lib/wordfall-draw.js Painting the sky, the ground and the half-typed words drawWord, drawGround, renderGame
lib/wordfall-main.js The glue: the keyboard, the phone keyboard, the loop doAction, connectKeyboard, gameLoop

💡 The big idea: you never choose a target — the letters choose it for you. Six words are falling, you press one key, and the game works out which one you meant: of everything that starts with what you have typed, the one nearest the ground. That is the same idea behind a search box completing your sentence, and it is twelve lines of code.

🛠️ Want to be walked through it? Build Word Rain Yourself takes you through the key functions one step at a time and tests each one you write. There is a Python version too.