✦ Sky Word

A celestial daily word game — guess the hidden word, ignite the tiles, and chart a new constellation every time you win.

A polished, dependency-free take on the classic word game, wrapped in a living observatory sky that shifts with your local time of day.

▶ Play it · Features · How to play · Run locally · Deploy

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✨ Features

Sky Word keeps the addictive core of a daily word game and layers real personality on top:

• 🌌 Living time-of-day sky — a canvas starfield, drifting aurora ribbon, and an arcing sun/moon that all track your real local clock through dawn → day → dusk → night. The sky also auto-selects light vs. dark.
• 🔭 Tiles that ignite — guesses don't just flip; light kindles from the center of each dark-glass pane and settles into its color, staggered across the row.
• ⭐ Constellation collection — every solved Daily Transmission links your winning row into a named constellation, saved forever to a personal star chart. (The name is seeded from the date, so everyone gets the same one to compare.)
• 🎮 Multiple modes
  • Daily Transmission — one shared puzzle per day, same word for everyone, with streaks.
  • Deep Space — endless practice with no streak pressure, in 4, 5, or 6 letters.
  • Locked Coordinates (Hard mode) — revealed hints must be reused.
• 📊 Stats as a star chart — games played, win %, current/best streak, and a guess-distribution "light readings" chart.
• 🔤 Colorblind-safe by design — every state carries a glyph (★ correct, ○ present, · absent) on tiles and keys, with a high-contrast option. Color is never the only signal.
• 📡 Glyph-grid share — results copy as a clean grid of star/ring/dot characters plus the constellation name, so a paste reads like a logged sky observation.
• 🔊 Optional generated audio — soft synthesized tones for taps, wins, and losses (Web Audio API, zero asset files). Off until you enable it.
• ♿ Accessible & respectful — full physical-keyboard support, focus rings, ARIA live regions, and prefers-reduced-motion fully honored (the sky goes still and reveals become instant).
• 📖 Generous dictionary — a curated offline word list, plus an optional online lookup so legitimate guesses rarely get rejected.

No frameworks, no build step, no tracking. Just index.html, a little CSS, and vanilla ES modules.

🎯 How to play

Guess the hidden word in 6 tries. Each guess must be a real word; press Enter to lock it in. After each guess the tiles reveal how close you were:

Tile	Glyph	Meaning
🟩 Correct	★	Right letter, right spot.
🟧 Present	○	Right letter, wrong spot.
⬛ Absent	·	Not in the word.

Solve the Daily to chart a constellation — or drift through Deep Space for endless play.

🚀 Play

▶ https://notbangbang-dev.github.io/sky-word/

(Give the first deploy a minute or two after enabling Pages.)

🛠 Run locally

The app is fully static — any static file server works. Two easy options:

# Python (no install)
python -m http.server 4317
# then open http://localhost:4317

# …or via npm
npm start        # python http server on :4317
npm run serve    # npx serve on :4317

Open it through http://localhost, not file:// — browsers block ES modules on the file: protocol.

Validate the word lists at any time:

npm run check    # node tools/check-words.mjs

📦 Deploy

The site is plain static files at the repo root, so GitHub Pages serves it directly from the main branch — every push auto-publishes, no build step.

1. Push the repo to GitHub.
2. Settings → Pages → Build and deployment → Source: Deploy from a branch, then pick main / / (root) and Save.
3. Wait a minute; the site goes live at https://<your-username>.github.io/sky-word/.

🧱 Project structure

sky-word/
├─ index.html              # markup shell + sky layers
├─ css/styles.css          # the "Observatory" theme, sky engine & animations
├─ js/
│  ├─ main.js              # controller: input, submit flow, persistence wiring
│  ├─ game.js              # pure rules: evaluation, daily seeding, hard mode
│  ├─ words.js             # curated 4/5/6-letter word lists
│  ├─ ui.js                # DOM rendering, ignite reveal, modals, constellation
│  ├─ sky.js               # time-of-day sky engine (starfield, aurora, sun/moon)
│  ├─ storage.js           # localStorage (settings, stats, daily, constellations)
│  ├─ share.js             # glyph-grid share text + clipboard
│  ├─ sound.js             # Web Audio tone palette
│  └─ confetti.js          # CSS/canvas star-spark celebration
└─ tools/                  # word-list + logic test harness

🎨 Tech

Vanilla HTML/CSS/JavaScript (ES modules) · Canvas 2D for the sky and confetti · Web Audio API for sound · localStorage for persistence · Fraunces + Space Grotesk type.

📄 License

MIT — do what you like, just keep the notice.

_{Made with starlight. ✦}