Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD45 → Letterout
By tohubohu
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 408 | 3.59 | 61 | |
| Fun | 388 | 3.49 | 61 | |
| Innovation | 298 | 3.55 | 61 | |
| Theme | 417 | 3.50 | 61 | |
| Graphics | 740 | 3.19 | 59 | |
| Audio | 648 | 2.57 | 56 | |
| Humor | 692 | 2.42 | 50 | |
| Mood | 857 | 2.93 | 53 |
This takes me back to the good old Scrabble games! I like the idea that you have to fill in certain squares to get to the next level. It's unclear if there is always an optimal solution or if the tiles are just given to you randomly. The goals are well-explained and immediately understandable. Little bit of background music might help.
Solid entry to the jam! Nice graphics, nice idea (makes me think about the concept of a dungeon scrawbler type of game) and fun view of the theme. About the audio, even with the lack of more music the sound effects are really nice .
This would be a fantastic tablet game! I miss having a button to recall all of the pieces, but I like the dungeon crawler scrabble idea, and very clever with the theme. :)
amazing game! i can't believe this is your first jam! amazing concept, although very hard. i think you definitely could have gone for the compo. also, thanks for making it webGL, too many people only link a download.
Really cool attempt at a singleplayer scrabble game. The discard mechanic giving you a piece with lower value works really.
It also seems like we interpreted the theme in the same way... ;D
Yes... Very nice, I liked playing it...
Nice! I think it's better than my dictionary game.
If the scrabble meet a puzzle game in a dungeon :laughing: I love the concept ! Very cool gameplay and nice game !
Very interesting gameplay for word games
Really cool idea, I had fun playing this. It might not appeal as much to people not familiar with Scrabble but I think you explain how the board works well anyway. I like the different layouts and the way the challenge increases as you go. A few minor things; - The wrong word sound effect is harsh. - The exit tiles and empty tiles look too similar. - It would be nice to have a scramble tiles option and a recall tiles option. - I didn't really bother chasing points but they could be given more value with achievements.
Otherwise, I thought this was great, maybe my favourite game so far. This should be a game mode on Words With Friends.
letterout.png
Really cool! I was a little sad the first board effectively forces you to play "nothing", but only because I really wanted to play "thong" xD It works great as a tutorial and is a really fun twist on the theme.
Nice scrabble like game! Strangely addicting when you get going. Everything gameplay-wise seemed to work really well and was quite easy to control and all that. Now some minor thing I would have liked is to easily be able to drag and drop rearrange available letters, also when I fullscreen the web player some parts of the screen is cut of, this reduced the experience a little but overall great submission.
@kodiqi Thanks for the feedback. I agree with all of your comments. Especially the Words With Friends bit! Hahah.
@khorm Thanks for the heads up about the screen resolution issue. It was designed with a 16:9 screen in mind and I tried to make it small enough to be usable by a lot of different screen sizes, but I'll keep that in mind if I continue to work with this code and concept.
Cool idea, and good presentation A few things : - it's actually pretty easy, I never had to sacrifice a letter. - Barren soundscape , with the occasional wrong buzz that buzzes the soul itself - Not much creativity in the stages, my favorite was the one with the one-tile passages in the middle but I feel like there is room for a lot more
Interesting twist on the old scrabble game. I enjoyed playing through and had to think carefully about playing words that would help me get to the exit, not just score well. Good job.
Excellent idea on the approach on the theme. Good job overall. I found the "incorrect word" sound to harsh.
Original approach to the theme ^^ As mentioned by someone else I would use a softer sound for the wrong word mistake :)
Playing it on Firefox, the first level is just entirely black for me.
well done! I'm really bad at scrabble though
great concept, would love to see it fleshed out with more mechanics -- like maybe you could cast a spell to pull a desired letter, or manipulate the amount of points a letter is worth, or change the tiles on the board to your advantage. great submission.
Nice! I love word games and this was a really good interpretation of the theme. Everything worked really smoothly and seemed like a pretty complete implementation. I especially like the "discarding tiles subtracts letter point value" mechanic, that was well done and a good balancing mechanic. My only suggestion is to add more "juice" and make it more responsive and animated and playful.
This is a really interesting concept - I haven't seen someone gamify scrabble in this way before! I laugh at the people saying this is easy, because I found it pretty hard! At first, I tried to maximize my score. Then I realized how bad I was at Scrabble and just tried to make it to the end. I did find a nice strategy though! If you're spelling out a word that has multiple subwords (e.g. `page`) you can double count letters by building out the word a piece at a time (e.g. `pa` -> `page`). Not sure if this was intended since I also get the tile bonuses multiple times as well! My biggest nit is that I wish I could restart a single level if I accidentally sabotaged myself out of an exit
Grat concept, shame that i sucks at scrabble. At least in english, since its not my native language *lol*That would do as a nice tablet game, thats for sure.
@svipal Thanks for the feedback. Agreed with everyone on the SFX - the audio was a last minute add, and for someone who thinks that game audio can have a transformative impact, it hurt a bit to ignore.
@scalliondelight Thanks! Yeah, the initial concept I posted about in the beginning included a "spellbook" because spelling... spells... was gonna have currency and all this other stuff, but getting the basics down was enough of a challenge! I'm glad I got rid of the timer though.
@joel-davis Yes! More juice for sure. I wanted those bonus tiles to feel good to get, and make all the flashy things. Generating art assets and animation is not a strength of mine though, it probably would have taken way more time to get it right than I had to spare.
@frenchie The idea that you can score off of your previous plays was intentional (similar to Scrabble), though you're right that it does incentivize a bit of a hack for some extra points. One of the things I wanted to do was add a "length" bonus for playing longer words, but I wanted some of the aforementioned juice for that and just left it out of this version. What I didn't intend and I'm glad you caught is that you can get the tile bonuses multiple times! I'll have to fix that, but not in this version... keeping the bugs and all from what I submitted for the LD45 timeframe. As far as restarting or something, yeah, would agree, and have ideas for a couple different game modes if I proceed with this concept.
@raomer The game might be fairly easy to localize for (some) other languages. It reads the valid word list from a text file. The letters are just based on a hardcoded range in a character set, but converting that to a separate file along with their values (based on frequency of use in that language) would definitely be doable!
I appreciate everyone taking the time to play, rate, and comment on this game. Thank you all!
nice entry, seems very polished and solid but i'm useless at scrabble style games although i gave it a good go (i couldn't get to level 10), a way to clear the level and start again would be nice (unless i missed it), it fits the theme well (you literally start with N,O,T,H,I,N,G), well done!
Lol, fun game. I ended up in a weird situation here, as you can see. I enjoyed playing this. ouuooou.png
@cybersoftuk Thank you. Nope, you didn't miss anything. This version doesn't have a feature to restart a level.
@dib Thanks! Yeah, as @geoff-nagy wondered, the tiles are distributed randomly from a set pool of letters, with some letters appearing more than others (e.g. there are two Zs, three Bs, eight Os, and so on)... there isn't an algorithm looking for an optimal play. It looks like you won the coin toss on getting a ton of vowels though!
Nice! Not my favorite genre tbh, but it's a solid entry.
A small issue I've seen is that it fails to recognize vertical words and thinks I put in an incorrect horizontal one. For example here I tried to spell TAR vertiacally, but it didn't let me. But it let me put in a single S to turn TAG into STAG, but it doesn't complain about the vertical TS making no sense. So that's a little inconsistent.Screenshot_2019-10-11 Unity WebGL Player Letterout.png
@0x53ee71ebe11e Hm. I’ll look into that. My first guess is that “ATAG” wasn’t in the wordlist but “TS” is (for whatever reason... an abbreviation for Tosyl or Tennessine perhaps). The open source wordlist I point to has about 370k entries, some of which would make a traditional Scrabble player cringe. Not my favorite, but it was available. Will take a look though. Thanks!
Edit: Confirmed that "TS" and "AMAR" are both in the wordlist and "ATAG" is not, which explains the issue you experienced. Still agree that it doesn't really make much sense though from an "allowed words" perspective. Future iterations, if there are any, will have a cleaner wordlist.
Hey ! Good variation on the scrabble game. Not that easy for non-english native speakers though !
This game is good
thisgameisgood.png
I looped back to level 10 when I beat it, and "linux" isn't a word which bothers me as a pretentious linux user.
This is impressive for a solo go! Nicely done
really good game here -- like the idea of going to the next level