Poem Playground

How to Play

Poem Playground is an exploration of poems as puzzles. Click the dice to generate a random poem, or search by an author’s name. The poem's lines will appear scrambled—your challenge is to rearrange them into their original order. Use the eyeglasses to check your work (green means the line is correctly placed) and the key icon to reveal the poem in its proper sequence. When you're ready for a new puzzle, click the pen icon for a fresh poem. Hope you have fun in the poem playground!

Process

I created Poem Playground as a Christmas gift for my dad in December 2024. He is a poetry nerd who loves discovering and memorizing poems. I wanted to design a relaxing game for him to interact with poems deeply—not just reading them through, but spending time with each line's language, rhythm, and flow. The inspiration came from my college intro to poetry class, where the professor gave out a scrambled up poem and challenged us to figure out its correct sequence.

To bring this idea to life, I used PoetryDB, an online poetry database, to pull in random poems. I built the game in Unity, using PoetryDB's API to fetch poems in JSON format. The player can generate a random poem or search by author and  receive a warning if the poet isn't found in the database. To keep the game manageable, I limited poem length to under 14 lines so they would fit the screen comfortably.

Visually, each line appears on a textured 'strip of paper' with randomized flips and rotations for a natural, artistic feel. Players can drag these strips around the screen to reorder them. To check the correctness, the game compares the vertical (Y-axis) position of each strip to the original order received from the database.

Reflections

Poem Playground helped me explore core game design concepts, including UI elements like buttons and input fields, working with APIs, and manipulating 2D transforms and textures. Using PoetryDB taught me how to make dynamic API calls and handle JSON data parsing. As a big nerd myself, I find educational games and experiences fun and enjoyable to create. My dad loves Poem Playground too, and he is not what one would consider a “gamer”, so I’d call the project a success!

Next Steps

While Poem Playground is simple and effective, there are some interesting ways it could be expanded. Since PoetryDB only includes poems in the public domain, most selections are older works by poets like Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson. Expanding the database to include more contemporary poetry would create a more diverse experience, though it would likely involve navigating copyright challenges. Adding selectable difficulty levels—such as easy, medium, and hard—could also enhance the gameplay, as shorter, rhyming poems tend to be easier to solve.  Additional features like a personal gallery for saving favorite poems and a timer mode for speed-based challenges could make the game more interactive and fun! To polish the game even more, I could add a start screen, how-to-play tutorial, sound effects, and music.