Evolving Words by rjhunter

[raw]
made by rjhunter for LD24 (JAM)
A web-based word game. Evolve from a CELL to a WORM, from a FISH to a FROG, one letter at a time.

Needs a pretty modern browser. Tested mostly in Chrome and Safari, should work on recent Firefox too. Internet Explorer is unlikely to deal. It'd be fun to try on a mobile device.

The game didn't wind up at all where I wanted it, but I figure since I've come this far, I might as well go the distance... :-)

For build and develop, I used Ruby's MiddleMan gem. I wrote my code in CoffeeScript, and built some offline precalculation using Node.js.
At run-time, I'm using: d3.js, jQuery, Mustache


- Images are all photographs I took during the compo.
- Sounds are, naturally, bfxr/cfxr.
- No music this time.
- The HTML and CSS was the default boilerplate generated by the Middleman, but has since been completely replaced.
- POTENTIAL RULE-BEND: The word list was generated from the ispell English dictionary wordlist . A couple of IRC people said it should be fine to use a dictionary but a word list isn't explicitly covered by the exemptions like fonts and drum loops.

Feedback

echa
28. Aug 2012 路 16:29 UTC
Good conception.

Is it possible that the game would be in other languages?
馃帳 rjhunter
29. Aug 2012 路 03:41 UTC
Right now the game is English-only, but I would like to add support for other languages after the competition.

Some languages will work better than others -- for example, Chinese would probably be a completely different game!
chas
29. Aug 2012 路 14:37 UTC
BRAVO, rjhunter. At the outset I was like "oh, it's broken. How can I connect hail and worm?"..and a few minutes later, it was so gratifying to get it! It's very cool and it makes us use brain-muscles that we use rarely use. Great job.

I have a huge interest in developing new gameplay mechanics using words. For a different jam, I did a very similar game but instead of linking the words by spelling-similarity, I used an MIT-supplied concept net and linked them via concept/meaning. You can try it at argumentchampion.com if you want.

Congrats!
matheod
30. Aug 2012 路 17:26 UTC
Take me time to understand, and as not in my languages more difficult, but good game.
Teknik
01. Sep 2012 路 15:33 UTC
doesn't seem to work for me. game loaded but it would let me click or type any where. all i could do was highlight the text in the choices.
kibertoad
15. Sep 2012 路 17:44 UTC
Amazing :)
ratking
17. Sep 2012 路 13:42 UTC
Very nice idea!