Ivan Habor

Projects

Planet of Words

A game for children who are learning letters. Sofi flies around a bare planet catching letters, and every word she spells appears on the planet as the thing it names.

Status
Shipped
Year
2026
Stack
Godot / Blender / Gemini TTS / Cloudflare Workers

In Ukrainian the game is called Планета слів. The planet starts with nothing on it but land, sea and mountains. The words come in the order of a simplified history, so the planet grows from a campfire to a village.

It started as one game inside Bukvohrai, my alphabet app, where a biplane collected words like КИТ and МАЯК. I reworked it into a game about building a civilisation and then split it off as an app of its own, for the web and Android.

A flight

The child spells a word by flying Sofi into its letters in order. A wrong letter costs nothing and flies off elsewhere. A compass points at the nearest letter still needed, and when the child stops steering, the game steers towards it at a quarter of the autopilot’s strength. Hints are spoken, for children who cannot read yet.

A flight on the hot-air balloon over the planet. At the top, the word FIELD with its letters still empty and the counter Word 1 of 5.

When a word is complete, a voice says it and one fact about it, and the thing appears on the planet. Then Sofi runs a short errand for it: light the fire, plant the forest, carry berries to the cave, escort the boat. On the way she can fly through wind rings and do a flip. The game saves progress between launches.

Two eras so far

The first era, First People, is flown on a bird: FIRE, FOREST, FISH, CAVE, BOAT. A story level follows, Light Smoke, where Sofi collects the word BALLOON and gets a hot-air balloon. The second era, Village, is flown on the balloon: FIELD, HOUSE, HORSE, MILL, CART. The house grows where the cave was.

The start screen in English. The planet is partly built, with a forest, a field and a house by the lake, and the row of icons shows the words collected so far.

After the village the game says a new era is coming. The plan is a biplane, then a plane, then a rocket. The rocket finishes the planet, and Sofi flies to a new one.

How it is made

I built the game in Godot 4.7. Python scripts generate the 3D models in Blender, and the game draws them with toon shaders. The voice is Gemini TTS, and the game is in Ukrainian and English, voice included.

On a phone held upright the child steers with gestures and one speed button. A tablet held sideways gets a joystick and buttons, and a computer uses the keyboard.

A 40 MB engine on Cloudflare

Godot’s web engine, index.wasm, is 39.5 MB, and Cloudflare’s static assets take files of up to 25 MiB. The deploy script compresses the engine and the game data with brotli. A Worker runs only for those two files and serves them with Content-Encoding: br, so the browser unpacks them itself. Every other file is a plain static asset. A player downloads about 24 MB instead of 59, and the game installs as an app and works offline.

Stage

I finished the first version on 25 September 2026 and posted a trailer on X. It is live at planeta-sliv.ivanhabor.com. The Android build is not in a store yet.