FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD45 → Words From Nothing

Words From Nothing

By nekusoul

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall1893.5532
Fun2903.1531
Innovation244.1531
Theme174.3432
Graphics3063.1331
Audio2.8017

Comments

purpledartfrog 2019-10-08 10:02

Very good entry ... took me a second run at the game... because I didn't think .... (objective seems obvious now that I saw it :rofl:)

:purple_heart: :dart: :frog:

tohubohu 2019-10-08 10:10

Hey, that's pretty cool! Must be a fairly efficient lookup to generate these words so quickly. Well done! I'll admit, I still haven't found everything, but I did find "thelitises", and then I had to look up the definition... LOL. Cheers on taking this theme in the same general direction, and congrats on the submission!

nekusoul 2019-10-08 10:22

@tohubohu Yeah, finding a word that fits in a reasonable timeframe was the biggest hurdle and took me a few tries to get right, but after implementing a temporary cache the performance is (mostly) ok.

skyeward 2019-10-08 11:35

This is the best idea for a game I've seen this entire jam - I couldn't finish it but it's such a great concept.

akusan 2019-10-08 11:39

Pretty interesting game. nice use of procedural generation. I can't seem to find everything. Is there a trick to it? great concept though.

coffeedrinkers 2019-10-08 11:41

+1, best idea and great execution! Congrats!

boats 2019-10-08 11:47

Like the others, I'm having no luck finishing it. I do think there's lots of strategy involved in this though, being able to re-roll letters seems incredibly useful but I wasn't able to make much use of it. Perfect execution of the theme though, I love the idea.

nekusoul 2019-10-08 12:07

@akusan @boats

Finding 'everything' is indeed not an easy task. My recommendation is to a create a few vertical words, making heavy use of rerolling those words and once those letters line up to spell 'everything' try to create a horizontal word and reroll until it hits everything. Getting the more rare letters like 'y' and 'v' in place also really helps to reroll into the correct word.

frank-gevaerts 2019-10-08 15:17

Nice! I played on linux, and build works fine for me. My main issue was that I didn't figure out you could re-roll a word (or parts of it), I had to read comments here to find that out, and that's kind of essential. Maybe mention it in the description?

I suspect there's not much replay value in this, but for an LD game that doesn't matter.

One issue though: with scrollwheels there are two possible directions for zooming in, and I disagree with you about which is the correct one :)

themista92 2019-10-08 15:41

Super interesting concept, quite hard to get to the point you want to get. Sounds a little to harsh in my opinion, but still great game!

nekusoul 2019-10-08 15:43

@frank-gevaerts Huh, seems like I accidentally deleted the line of text that explains how rerolling works when I made a modification to the rules. Oops. I'll put up warning for the missing rule. Thanks for the info.

narffy 2019-10-08 16:50

Very good concept and theme interpretation, very good job !

benji-kershenbaum 2019-10-08 19:33

Good twist on the theme. Couldn't finish it, but still fun!

lewis-c-parr 2019-10-08 19:56

Really cool, good job!

gerugames 2019-10-08 20:41

lmaooo this game was funny, good job!

matt-rix 2019-10-08 21:18

So good! I tried to come up with a word game myself starting with the letters "NOTHING" on the board, but didn't even consider randomly generating the words as you draw lines, genius!

The game was incredibly hard until I discovered the reroll rule, which made it stil hard but at least bearable.

At first I thought the game would only give me "everything" if there were no other viable words that fit, but that turned out to not be the case.

I came up with a way to solve it using reroll that was still tricky, but at least got it done pretty quick after that.

Proof: https://i.imgur.com/noIBFO5.png Here was my way to approach the solution (spoilers): I would spell a long word, and then with any E/V/R I would reroll 3 letter words around them until I got EVE or EVER, then turn that into EVERY and extend that to a 10 letter word and hope to get "EVERYTHING". I got "EVERYPLACE" and "EVERYWHERE" a bunch of times first. The same thing would be possible working backwards from "THING" but it's harder (you also end up with words like UNCLOTHING).

Oh and here's what my board looked like right before I beat it (again, spoilers): https://i.imgur.com/PeizHMv.png

One bit of feedback is that it would be nice if the reroll went through all the possible letters in order instead of truly random like it is now. Sometimes you have to click a lot to get to a letter you know is valid.

Anyway, that's about it. Just wanted to say I thought this game was great and it's a really unique experience.

gustav-andersson 2019-10-08 21:45

Never seen anything like this, interesting and very hard :)

2019-10-09 19:47

It's funny because I had exactly the same idea at the beginning ! I wanted to make a game which would started with the word nothing ! But I'm not a native English so it was a little bit complicated.. Great job ! I absolutely love iiit

2021-08-24 09:48

Quite an interesting idea. It's been a long time since I've played with such one-word crosswords. These games have always been fascinating to me. A whole wave of words comes from one word. I remember my first crossword puzzle. I then thought long and hard about it for a long time. I even had to use the german article crossword clue. Otherwise, it would have remained unsolved. Now I am glad that I have gained a lot of experience in this. And it's easy for me to solve such crosswords. But I need even more understanding because I haven't finished your crossword puzzle yet. But I would like to do it.