ueighti 2025-10-06 20:03
Nice entry. It has own potencial.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD58 → Unwordy
By omiya-games
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 461 | 3.42 | 22 | |
| Fun | 311 | 3.47 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 18 | 4.20 | 22 | |
| Theme | 408 | 3.65 | 22 | |
| Graphics | 705 | 2.28 | 21 | |
| Humor | 598 | 2.41 | 20 | |
| Mood | 756 | 2.47 | 20 |
Nice entry. It has own potencial.
This is so cool! I love the prisoner's dilemma-esque problem of coming up with words that most other people wouldn't think of. I think I got in pretty early though considering most of my words were brand new.
I tried to play a second round and all my submissions on phase 2 were stuck on "checking..." so I think I lost connection?
@notexplosive I've faced the same problem before. I dunno why it happens. Maybe the CDN link I'm using to verify whether the word is in the dictionary sometimes goes offline? Or maybe it doesn't like the traffic.
It's something I should look into. This was a tough project to work on.
Interesting concept. I was too focused on thinking of uncommon words, so I ran out of time and had entered little.
I really think you can add a sound effect, at least some background music in this game. They can help to create the atmosphere.
Such an interesting take on the theme! I'm not sure if my spelling was off but I felt like I hit so many unknown words that were uncommon.
@daniel123 Oh, a 100% agreed. I just ran out of time.
I really like the idea and I think the leaderboard mechanism makes the game especially fun! I did run into a bug that made every word that I entered say "Checking..." tho for the 2nd and 4th time I played.
An interesting idea that encourages social interaction and competition!
I found it challenging because I don't speak English very well, but overall I enjoyed it.
Perhaps more customization options would allow for more interesting interactions. For example, instead of a name (why only three letters?), you could add a link to the user's LD page.
@zidan-banan: > why only three letters?
Partly because it's a callback to old arcades that would only accept three letters. Mostly because I didn't have the time to add in a bad-words-censoring filter, so limiting the number of letters one could enter was an easy way to cull most of them.
Not going to leave a rating because it seems like a server issue - I got a LOT of "Error" on the words I entered, I originally assumed I was being stupid and making typos or the uncommon words I was trying to type weren't actually real words, so I switched to entering very simple ones but still kept on getting Error:
unwordy.png
Super cool concept, and really impressive to have made something with this much networking involved! If I'm not wrong and this is a server issue that is able to be fixed can you reply to this so I can revisit the game?
@benskca I checked the words you've entered and it seems to work fine for me. Not sure what's going on. Screenshot 2025-10-22 142826.png
I am aware that restarting the game the second time often leads to errors and timeouts. I'm not entirely sure why. My first assumption would be the dictionary API I'm using isn't available, and if I were to improve on the game, that I should really look into an offline dictionary, instead. Alas, I didn't have the time to do that for this entry.
This is definitely one of the most novel games I've seen in an LD, and it ties into the theme pretty well, the collection nicely fitting into the overall game, although I think I might have ended up with a few too many letters for specifics of those to have a significant impact.
I do possibly have a bone to pick with the dictionary API that you've hooked into though: unwordy.png If we ignore a couple of miserable misspellings and my experiment with "memed", a lot of those words seem like they should be valid and it just doesn't like that I've conjugated them.
A very impressive entry, congrats.
Very novel take on the theme! I wouldn't have the guts to try connecting to an online dictionary and making an online leaderboard in a jam game, so kudos for that. It was a good challenge to try to come up with rare words, and there's certainly a trade-off between spamming common words or taking the time to think of difficult words using the letters you have.
I also ran into the "checking..." issue in my second attempt. Not sure if debugging to find the cause would be better than switching to an offline dictionary in the future.
This is such a neat idea. The polish / presentation are simple but effective. Great work.
I got a lot of "checking / error" too. I'm using Firefox, for the record. But it's really cool to make a game like this that depends on other people's guesses. With more participants over time, it could evolve into something really interesting. My only gameplay nitpick is that I think it was a little bit easy to catch the vast majority of the words in phase 1. This means your available letters are basically just determined by what words the game happens to randomly throw at you, and you end up with so many letters that the "letter budget" doesn't really come into play very much. Not sure if you want to address it or not, but it's something I noticed. Overall, thanks for making this and well done!
Interesting take on the theme.
Feels like there's a missing piece here to round out the gameplay, the first phase doesn't seem to really matter much beyond seeding letters. It goes so fast it could just as well be random and I don't think it would meaningfully change the second phase.
Maybe if there was more decision making involved it'd make the phase more impactful? Eg, if I had to choose between words instead of just collect all I can with no limits other than time.
Game worked fine, no bugs, and cool idea. Nice work!
Really interesting game for this theme! Picking words and rearrange them is cool, but I got many "checking/error" to, hope this can be fixed in the future. Still a wonderful game to play!
> Not sure if debugging to find the cause would be better than switching to an offline dictionary in the future. > @abcdef65g
Hard agree on this. I'm using a dinky server where I'm not even sure it supports Python, so getting an offline dictionary hosted and ready was starting to look daunting during the game jam. If I ever get around to it, I would like to switch to a Python server and switch to using ODict or a similar library to handle the problem.
Clever. It's not the type of game I typically enjoy (never been much of a fan of boggle) but I could see it being a lot of people's kind of thing.
I wish there was something more of a strategic decision about collecting the words, like trying to make sure you get certain letters. In the end you end up with a ton of most letters. I think having more of a constraint in your choice of letters would make that part of the game more of a puzzle.
Overall, quite nice.