MegaWord

What it is

MegaWord is a Wordle-style game for the Sega Mega Drive.

Five letters, six guesses, green/yellow/grey tiles, all running on 16-bit hardware from the late 80s.

It ships with a 3,000+ word list, timed modes, sound effects, animations and pixel-art backgrounds. It was built using SGDK, Codex, ChatGPT Image 2.0 and a lot of late nights, and runs on original Sega Mega Drive hardware as well as via emulation.

Why I made it

I love the Mega Drive. I also play Wordle every day. That’s pretty much it.

At some point I thought “Wordle would be fun on a Mega Drive”, then apparently decided to spend a big chunk of my spare time making that real.

It’s not trying to be some huge original idea. It’s just a fun homebrew project that let me make something for the console I grew up with.

How it came together

Before this, I’d tried making a platformer in SGDK and it went badly. I bit off too much, got stuck and never finished it.

MegaWord was me trying to be a bit more sensible. Smaller idea. Clear rules. Proper planning. No scrolling levels. No physics. Just a game I could actually finish.

The first playable version came together quicker than I expected. Getting guesses working, checking letters, moving between screens and handling the controller was all fairly straightforward once I got going — and it was such a buzz to see it running on my Sega Mega Drive 2 connected to a CRT TV for the first time.

Then the rest of it took ages.

The menus, sprites, sound effects, logo, animations and backgrounds all needed more work than I expected. The backgrounds were the worst/best part. I used ChatGPT Images 2.0 for some of the starting points, but getting them onto the Mega Drive properly was a whole thing.

The hardware has strict palette limits and my early imports looked terrible. SGDK’s default conversion wasn’t giving me what I wanted, so I ended up making my own custom colour-swap tool to force the images into palettes the Mega Drive could actually use.

I used Codex and ChatGPT a lot throughout the project. Not to magically make the game for me, but to help me work through C problems, debugging, small tools and ideas when I got stuck. It felt a bit like having someone next to me who was happy to rubber-duck the annoying bits at 1am.

What’s next

I want to do a small physical run on flash carts with sleeves, labels and maybe a manual.

The ROM will also be available for free download on itch.io and the MegaWord site (whenever I get around to it). After that I’d like to add more challenge modes, animations, backgrounds, music and expand the word list.

Read the full build log →