Feeding Words

actyl 2020-04-22 07:53

I absolutely love word games and this is a really nice direction to take a boggle type game. The one thing that I take issue with is that I can't tell when I'm in danger of the spirit of words dying. I'd like to have some meter somewhere that shows me how long I have. That being said, I had a lot of fun playing it - love the chess piece movement upgrades - love the strategic element of trying to preserve my consonant-to-vowel ratio - and I defy all comers to best my high score of 1044, which I absolutely cannot prove due to the fact that my laptop apparently cannot screenshot a gamemaker window.

marcin-godzina 2020-04-22 08:15

Nice word game, but I lack the timer till the death of spirit. Some kind of bar or something more terrifying.

smirnov48 2020-04-25 21:33

Nice game.

notgreat 2020-04-26 02:04

@actyl @marcin-godzina The words become red as they're consumed which sort of acts as a timer but I agree that something clearer would've been better. If I had more time I definitely would've added an audio cue. Thanks for the feedback!

Oh, and Actyl: I don't know half the words I used, but highscore.png

And I'm sure it's possible to go far beyond that with the right power ups and a better eye for longer words. If you care, I used the word list at https://github.com/dwyl/english-words/blob/master/words_alpha.txt

actyl 2020-04-26 03:35

Ohh! Thank you! I'll give it a few more goes :)

raphy 2020-05-08 12:52

Cool concept!

tompudding 2020-05-09 11:13

This is a nice simple premise that's easy to grasp and quite fun, although it does make me feel like an idiot as I've always been bad at word puzzles.

turkey 2020-05-10 01:51

Simple, but wasn't overly fun to me. Some indicator to how much time or life you have would have been nice. A+ though for the shading to show which tiles you could go to next. Something these types of game don't usually have (That I see at least), that was a very nice QOL feature!

mark-keeble 2020-05-10 02:00

This is a really cool idea, and to be honest it was executed pretty well. I just think the concept itself isn't overly fun. You definetely tried to make it fun with the powerups which helped, but it felt like you were trying to fix a motor for like 1674. Either way, good submission overall!

actyl 2020-05-10 06:22

@notgreat ooo.png best offer so far. Still a really nice game - crashes every once in a while, haven't figured out what the cause is. It also took me forever to figure out that you can replace the tile shuffling thing, but once I did it opened up a whole lot of new stuff for me lol

testlab 2020-05-10 06:49

Honestly, it was a bit hard as a non native speaker, but i found it quite fun non the less! Maybe some kind of difficulty progression would be great, to get into some kind of flow. Congrats on your game!

notgreat 2020-05-10 08:32

@turkey The letters turn red as they're consumed but yeah, it should've been something more obvious.

@actyl Nice! You are now officially better than the developer! (for now...)

I just recently fixed a crash bug. It was happening when the tile randomization gets really unlucky (the exact maximum result causes it to try to access the 27th letter). If you redownload the executable, the crash should be fixed.

@testlab Oh, yeah, word games with time pressure are painful for nonnative speakers. I'm not sure I quite get what you mean about the difficulty progression though. The game does get continously harder as the letters get eaten faster and faster until eventually you're guaranteed to lose.

testlab 2020-05-10 08:47

@notgreat You are totally right, i didn't think about that!

f1krazy 2020-05-10 14:45

A pretty good entry. I'm not sure what word dictionary you're using but it's very comprehensive, there were no occasions where I tried to make a word and it wouldn't let me, and a couple of occasions where I was able to make a word I didn't think it would let me.

I feel like it could have done with some extra visual polish, and some audio as well. Perhaps it might have been better if you'd gone for the Jam: you'd have had extra time to polish it up, and you would have been able to use third-party audio assets.

As it is, though, it's not a bad game. I reckon it could be very entertaining if you took the time to polish it up.

nurkkacthulhu 2020-05-11 16:26

(note: I'm not a native English speaker) I did not have enough time to think, so I had to start trying random letter combinations (as there were words that sounded like gibberish, that I would have never known lol). Pretty neat game!

dan-thompson 2020-05-11 17:59

This game was super fun! I also didn't realize at first that the letters turning red was the "timer," (I guess this is where I admit that I didn't thoroughly read your description before I jumped in...) but once I did I enjoyed the challenge of trying to stay ahead of it and scramble to find new words. The durability of the letter tiles was a cool touch that also added an extra layer of strategy. Awesome job!

sinci1 2020-05-12 15:50

This was a super fun game! honestly words games are not really my thing but this was a fun take on the word game genre! This is also one of the more creative games I saw during this jam, for example I love how you incorporated the powerups, and how they use the chess move patterns. And the UI is really great as well, like the laser that connect the words and how it highlights which letter you can go on next.

My two main complaints would be that it was a bit hard to learn when I first booted it up, I didn't know why I kept dying, and I didn't know that you can use a power by clicking on it [like the Z ability].

and the second complaint is that after the second powerup it gets a bit too difficult for me personally, I think a mode selection [easy, medium, difficult] would be nice for this game.

Overall I think this is a fun game, and I could see it being a great full game as well!