FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD29 → Word Digger

Word Digger

By mattv

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Coolness296
Fun3103.34
Innovation4143.27
Overall4393.30
Graphics6113.09
Mood8222.69
Theme8892.84
Humor8921.96
Audio9851.73

Comments

pent 2014-04-28 02:32

Can you try to bugfix the name entry? Chrome on OSX and it doesn't let me enter anything.

ryebread761 2014-04-28 02:33

Good game, quite hard.

ehtd 2014-04-28 02:34

I think I am bad with words... nice game!

mattv 2014-04-28 02:36

@Pent - I'm not sure! It works for me in chrome OSX! I've noticed that unity web player sometimes won't take mouse input after you accept it to "run once", and you have to switch tabs and come back. Might that be the case here? Sorry! I'll try to see if I can figure anything else out.

zeh 2014-04-28 02:37

Great entry. Subtle but good use of the theme. I'm not a fan of the timer, but I see you have rankings so it makes it worth it.

jugglerrob 2014-04-28 02:37

I'm not very good at spelling games, but nice color scheme.

eskivor 2014-04-28 02:38

Funny game.

weazen 2014-04-28 03:07

Can't enter my name on OSX Chrome

mattv 2014-04-28 03:12

@weazen oh no! I just went and tried on my macbook and it worked. Are you having trouble playing other entries that use the unity webplayer or just mine?

aneeslol 2014-04-28 03:12

I liked it quite a bit, but I'm curious as to what actually counts as a word? Seems like a few times I'd get stuck and just drag the mouse around and it would count random 2 letter combinations as words.

mattv 2014-04-28 03:24

@aneeslol - the dictionary is supposedly the scrabble dictionary (unless there are bugs in my reading of it, which there were at the last minute and I hope I fixed).

andrewjamesadams 2014-04-28 03:28

I had the name issue on chrome OSX as well. I refresh and it was fine. Anyway, great game. Lots of fun.

terraco 2014-04-28 04:33

Don't know what language the dictionary is in. Maybe the letters need to be tweaked to allow more words to be made

tiffi_gaming 2014-04-28 12:43

Good use of theme!

doubstract 2014-04-28 15:46

I played it 30min, very good job!
Highscore: 318!(I am 4th right now :))

mattv 2014-04-28 17:40

@Doubstract - nice! Even beat my score!

stenol 2014-04-28 23:04

Great game. Miss some sfx but it's not important for that kind of game. Great work.

zednaut 2014-04-28 23:11

A fun little puzzle game! A lot of stuff really stumped me, but I had a lot of fun digging for words. Interesting use of the theme, too! Never would have thought of it.

mattv 2014-04-28 23:30

@stenol - oh man I know! I was gonna add sfx at the end and then I was just brain dead and hungry and instead some huge bugs came up. Definitely something to do different last time. I didn't even miss sound that much until I started playing other peoples games!

balloonsfor600 2014-04-29 00:53

I like the concept but wow it is tough to clear that board. I had a few good rounds, but that dang Z just kept showing up!

lars-faust 2014-04-29 12:58

It seems to come down to just connecting two random letters as fast as possible, as the game will often accept that.

However, the general idea is very good. Would like to see a more polished and probably a bit easier version for mobile. I think that could work really well.

mattv 2014-04-29 16:16

@Lars - Yeah I think something is wrong with my dictionary code... I'm looking at the data and it seems like a lot of bogus two letter words are in there. I'll definitely have to dig into that more if I decide to keep working on this. Thanks for playing!

mattv 2014-04-29 17:14

although, there are a surprisingly large number of bogus 2 letter words allowed in scrabble (the dictionary I am trying to use is a scrabble word list): http://www.scrabblefinder.com/two-letter-scrabble-words/ like come on AA is not a word!

mekuri 2014-04-29 18:25

Nice game- I liked the layered part a lot, great idea! The game felt solid and well polished. I had fun, and it's always fun when people add leaderboards ;)

brodavi 2014-04-29 22:39

Nice! Captured my attention. I got a few words that I think aren't words. I can just drag around the game kinda cheating :P

brodavi 2014-04-29 22:40

Nice! Captured my attention. I got a few words that I think aren't words. I can just drag around the game kinda cheating :P I didn't get any powerups though :(

mattv 2014-04-29 23:15

@brodavi thanks for playing! on the first day it punished players for submitting bad words, but people were pretty annoyed by that. Maybe I should do the opposite and reward players who don't miss? Something to think about if I polish it more! Also yeah some of the words seem bogus (because scrabble accepts bogus words, and because I might have a bug in my word checker)

porglezomp 2014-04-30 00:00

It seems to accept lots of two-vowel or consontant-vowel words. It's really fun though, I liked the leaderboards, how did you make them?

sparrow 2014-04-30 00:15

Woooooo! 302! I'm bad at these games but i'm in the highscore thanks to the two word exploit and sometimes seeing words.
Cool game, you should definately put this on mobile.

mattv 2014-04-30 00:39

@porglezomp I used dreamlo for the leaderboards: http://dreamlo.com/ I'm not sure how it would scale to production but it's SICKENINGLY easy for a prototype. This is the file in my project that does all the score posting, parsing, and display and it's like ~50 lines: https://github.com/MCSDWVL/worddigger/blob/master/Assets/Scripts/ScoreBoard.cs

mattv 2014-04-30 00:39

(um actually please don't look at that file since shows you how easy it would be to cheat... ha... haha... no one would do that right?!)

mattv 2014-04-30 00:40

@Sparrow & @porglezomp omg! There are probably bugs but also scrabble is just THE WORST about bullshit 2 letter words. QI IS NOT A WORD SCRABBLE. I DON'T CARE WHAT COUNTRY YOU SAY IT'S FROM.

njvas 2014-04-30 05:02

Enjoyed the gameplay. Would really love to play this on my phone!

vilya 2014-05-01 01:04

I like word games and this is a nice twist on the genre. I didn't have any idea what the power-ups would do though - in fact I kept forgetting I had them. Maybe a tutorial or something would help?

recursor 2014-05-01 18:10

I enjoyed this one quite a bit and have bookmarked it for later. Very nice job and a cool take on the theme.

mattv 2014-05-01 18:31

@Nic V - It will happen! @vilya - you are totally right, the first time user experience definitely needs a LOT of work if I polish this up post compo. Forgetting you have powerups is also a major problem that I have to think hard about fixing. @recursor - awesome thanks for playing!

zkenshin 2014-05-01 19:08

Really interesting entry, neat idea. Well done. :)

thorig 2014-05-02 11:15

Good game!

lerc 2014-05-04 12:06

Best I could do was 717. Needs a different way of thinking to most word games.

raiyumi 2014-05-17 05:35

This was a pretty fun game. Nice entry!