'I've turned down life-changing money': The story of Waffle
Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox
When I was asked if I'd like to speak to James Robinson, the creator of Wordle-like browser game Waffle, I wasn't especially enthusiastic.
After Wordle took the world by storm, there was a rush of similar games: Quordle, Factle, Heardle… Waffle was simply another one of those. The hook I was given is that Robinson – a solo developer based in Portsmouth, UK – had struck a deal with Amazon that gives Prime subscribers an exclusive daily Waffle game. That's certainly a little more interesting, but I still wasn't convinced.
But then, facing a delayed train, I decided to check the game out. After two hours, I'd played nearly 100 games. I told my wife, a fellow Wordle aficionado, about it, but it turned out she'd already exhausted the entire Waffle archive.
Waffle is a game where players must rearrange letters to find six five letter words, all presented in a grid that looks a little like a waffle. You have 15 turns to try and complete it. The key difference is that, unlike Wordle, there's little fortune involved. This is a game where high scores are achieved by skill, rather than luck.
"I was just doing the washing up, and I was thinking how Wordle could be transposed into something with a different dimension to it," Robinson tells us. "With Wordle, if you want to get the top score you have to be kind-of lucky, which isn't my sort of game.
"I quickly tried to see if I could make something in a four-by-four grid, but that was too difficult. So I came up with a five-by-five grid, only with some gaps in it so it's a bit easier to create. I then showed it to my wife who said: 'That looks a bit like a waffle.' I thought that sounded like a good name.
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
