Lexcavator is an experimental-ish retro arcade/word game that I’ve been working on since last March, and it’s finally ready for prime time. I’m really excited for people to play! Download it here. (Pay what you want, even if you want to pay $0.)

Some notes about the game:

• It’s programmed entirely in Python, using processing.py.
• I use Markov chains to keep related sequences of letters adjacent in the game board. The goal is to make a faster-paced word game where it’s easy to find meaty words.
• The global leaderboard is completely anonymous (I didn’t want to deal with user authentication), but it does a few things that not many other games do. First, you’re given a percentile rank for each score, which provides a better explanation of how you’re doing in comparison to other players than the global high score or a ranking alone. Second, after each game, you get a list of words that had never been found by any other player before (example from @robdubbin).

For more announcements about Lexcavator, follow @lexcavator on Twitter.

The home-grown chiptune soundtrack is available from Bandcamp. I’ve embedded the title screen track below.