HOT FIX
26 FEB 2024
GUBBINS V1.0.8
Great news, a patch just dropped with a few bug fixes and something very important— a major dictionary improvement. Firstly the peripherals.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to get stuck on launch if you're offline or have patchy internet
- Various other bug fixes and under the hood improvements.
MAJOR DICTIONARY IMPROVEMENTS
If you’ve been playing Gubbins for a while and your vocab is tip top, you may have encountered situations where you make a valid word (as recognised by Google, the official dictionaries etc.) and Gubbins doesn’t recognise it as a “real” word. We know that committing to a totally 9-letter word and having the game not accept it can essentially ruin games so we’ve been doing a deep dive into this in hopes of solving it.
Basically our dictionary is an amalgamation of a few free resources and a paid service. We’ve intentionally avoided incorporating dictionaries that are SO expansive, as they tend to include insane acronyms and garbage words. Including these would mean the game would accept almost any string of letters as a valid word, and is already its own issue (that people justifiably hate).
It’s worth noting that this issue is deceivingly complex. We have multiple word lists for different situations, including blocked words, preferred “common” words for the game to generate for mechanics like the Pencil and more. Additionally, a single recent word someone submitted to us is “TRANCHING”. This word is listed in Google’s dictionary, along with dictionary dot com and Wiktionary, but not on Collins and Merriam Webster. I can personally verify that there is an insanely common case, and an unfathomable number of words appear in some dictionaries and not others. As a four person team making games and running a business, I’m sorry, but I don’t expect we will ever do *better* than Merriam of house Webster BUT we can certainly do better than what we’re doing now.
(To our credit, I bet our word list is already much better than most of these at recent slang and colloquialisms)
TLDR (AND TO WRAP UP)
We’ve incorporated another massive dictionary into Gubbins, increasing our valid word pool by well over 20%, and we’ve done our best to remove the “junk words” from it (some would have slipped through, no doubt). On average, your valid words should be FAR MORE LIKELY to be accepted as valid but our dictionary will likely never be perfect, and will always be a work in progress. Thank you for your feedback on this front, we’re here, we’re listening, we’re workin’.
As always please feel free to hit me with any Qs, if you find junk words you’d like to see REMOVED from the word list you can also submit those!
THOUGHTS / FEELINGS / COMPLIMENTS / REQUESTS
We got you at: hello@folly.studio