Close Encounters of the Word Kind by Justin Mullin

[raw]
made by Justin Mullin for LD32 (COMPO)
A little game about resisting an alien invasion using words as your weapon. UFOs appear with three letter clues. For each UFO, you must find a word that contains these letters at the start, middle and end respectively.

Close Encounters of the Word Kind was written in Scala using the excellent LibGDX game development framework. Due to schedule conflicts I was only able to work for about 8 hours on this one, but I'm pretty happy with what I was able to accomplish!

Ratings

Coolness 66% 3
Overall 3.53 243
Audio 2.88 452
Fun 3.36 305
Graphics 3.22 434
Innovation 3.71 176
Mood 3.00 484
Theme 3.51 412

Feedback

DesignerNap
20. Apr 2015 · 12:47 UTC
Couldn't get this to run. Exe did not respond after double clicking? on windows 7.
Fenaer
20. Apr 2015 · 13:11 UTC
Very fun game, sound effects were fun. Sometimes found it hard to guess the word.
sydan
20. Apr 2015 · 14:08 UTC
When I hit enter to start the game closes! :( This is on Windows 8 64bit, Exe download.
sydan
20. Apr 2015 · 14:19 UTC
There are a few bugs but overall the idea of the gameplay is fun once I got the hang of it I managed to solve quite a few, I did make the mistake of trying to guess an exact word rather than type any that fits mostly because of the 'suggestions' that the ufos give when they leave being misleading.
ZQMony
21. Apr 2015 · 01:39 UTC
Very nice game. There were a few words that didn't work for me but impressively most of them did.
Harley77
21. Apr 2015 · 01:56 UTC
I learned two thing, I suck at word games, and two, you did an awesome job at making a word game.
Supernovadx
21. Apr 2015 · 01:58 UTC
The game crashed windows explorer. :(
sawyerWeld
21. Apr 2015 · 01:59 UTC
Cool game! I like the sound effects and the mood the best
Dustician
21. Apr 2015 · 02:00 UTC
This was much harder than I expected.
Cosine
22. Apr 2015 · 01:58 UTC
Loved the idea! Got in the rhythm of it after a while, and found it pretty fun. It crashed once unexpectedly :( I'm just thinking... I think I'll download this game's source and change the word list to Spanish. I think it'd be a fun way to work on vocab!
roving-stone
22. Apr 2015 · 06:55 UTC
Gameplay in this is great! Really makes you think.
Nuclear Mosquito
22. Apr 2015 · 10:50 UTC
I've played a lot of text games for ludum dare, but so far yours has been the best. It has some issues, but I like the fact that you have to think of words to type.
sP0CkEr2
23. Apr 2015 · 00:10 UTC
not bad for 8 hours work - i liked the game but some words did not always work
A Flat Miner Studios
23. Apr 2015 · 00:16 UTC
The initial instructions took too long, allowing users to skip would help a lot.
Pietro Ferrantelli
23. Apr 2015 · 02:11 UTC
Incredible for a 8h hour solo work ! Love the sound design and the gameplay is really fun ! Good job Justin !

(And thanks for your feedback on our game ! It still needs balancing but we made a small bugfix update after reading your post)
Frozenfire92
26. Apr 2015 · 00:31 UTC
Phenomenal! Had a blast and interested to check your source code now! Hope to see more!
Galan
26. Apr 2015 · 00:36 UTC
Damn fun word game. The difficulty curve is a bit rough, but it was still really fun. And the fact that you did it in 8 hours, in Scala, is impressive.
Os_Reboot
01. May 2015 · 13:32 UTC
Incredible concept. At first, when I saw the tutorial I doubted the fact that it would actually recognize complete words (I thought I might be able to just spam random letters). Nice job! The sound was minimalist and appropriate. The graphics were decent, I would have liked to see a failure mechanism or some kind of indication as to your progress. It was obvious that you spent a lot of time polishing. Very, very well done.
Tom Rijnbeek
02. May 2015 · 20:41 UTC
At first I thought this was just another clone of those games, but there was more to it than I thought. Sadly English is not my native language, which made this game harder than I thought.

The only thing I disliked was that because you have to think so much, there is not much speed in the game. There is some feeling of urgentness, but it's very limited. And then, after 50 UFO's, the game is suddenly over. That felt a bit anti-climactic to me. Otherwise, great!
TeamQuadratic
02. May 2015 · 22:50 UTC
Good presentation for a simple game. Great job!
alyphen
04. May 2015 · 01:47 UTC
Interesting concept, seems a little slow and hence pretty easy, but it's quite fun. Maybe if the speed increased a lot as you went on, it would hold people longer. Audio was very atmospheric and art had quite the interesting aesthetic.