I think this game idea is the most likely for me to return to and take another crack at it, once my skills have improved. In this version, the word you input is used as the seed for the random() function that determines things such as "strength", "movement frequency", "movement distance", and a few other variables I've forgotten. There's also something involved with the string length, but as this was a jam game, the details are fuzzy.
This means that in general, longer words are "better", and also that words behave the same way every time you put them in. Originally the idea was to do some fancy math on the words so that similar words would behave similarly. I never got to that point, but I'm still interested in that. I'd also like to allow words to meet and generate new words, as if they were little bugs running around and birthing new bugs (obviously some mixing of the words together).