Can't wait to start making ~~Text has been removed by admins because the idea was way too awesome~~ this weekend.

Whoops, these are public? hope no one steals our idea!

Quick screen shot of the progress on our Spelling / Survival game!



Procedural Map Generation - starting point:
https://imgur.com/3PMUHBF

Today Auggo killed it. Our procedural generation is nearly completed. fixed some bugs with the plants. Started on the destroyer of worlds and roadblocks. Things are definitely taking shape!

Here's a quick look at what not to do when scaling objects in code..

Oh no! Death Fog!
[death fog](https://youtu.be/a0ZKYV0JWxo)

This is a really cool design :D

Man this looks really good. You should keep working on this and maybe release it officially. Very polished for the most part.

Really cool mic between themes. I feel like the fog should move a bit slower in order to have more time to spell out word

Spelling and survival... I wouldn't have thought of this in a million years. I also wouldn't imagine it could be fun, but you found a way! Well done guys!

Its really cool and creative! I have a few critiques for you.

1. The movement felt a little weird since you always have to hold two movement keys to move aligned to the roads. When you rotate the camera while running it really spins you around and you get kinda messed up. Its also a bit unnatural to have all the movement be keyboard based but not have a way to interact with tiles via keyboard. Would have loved to have a button to place the letter using keyboard, as well as a mouse move mode would have felt really good.

2. Needs more vowels. Felt like 90% of the word needed vowels, and 10% of the letter drops were vowels. In general would have been cool to have bigger words and more stuff to do. Also it seems like there was supposed to be a way to get rid of letters you didnt want but while in the game I could not figure it out at all.

3. Not being able to leave the road was odd but I could get the conceit. Random cars you cant get around for arbitrary blockage was a little annoying. Would have been nice to just have buildings/no road where you dont want the player to go, or meaningful word blockades.

Overall really awesome job!

@DeadlyMidnight thanks!
Toggling to third person view definitely helps the movement along but I do see your point. Great feedback!

We did have 4 and 5 letter words as well and a higher vowel drop rate. Not sure what happened in the build but we will look into it. Again, thank-you!

Congrats on completing LD41!! The game has a nice concept behind and both the visuals and the music are great.

I think I found a small bug: I went back to the main menu, started a new game and the character remained stuck in the air (since nothing is moving, you might have timescale set to 0). Anyway, if you press ESC to show the menu and then resume playing, things go back to normal.

In terms of the game itself, I had a hard time finding the appropriate letters and I got stuck a couple of times (only one path to follow and none of the necessary letters).

Nonetheless, the game is quite fun and a really good effort!

Wow, thanks everyone for the comments! I've never put anything I've made out there for anyone to play, so it's really cool to see people liking it! I'm super psyched on this, thanks so much.

I'm uploading a WebGL build to my website, so I'll add that in a moment!

http://www.auggodoggogames.com/games/deathfogdash/ should give you the embedded game! Cheers!

this is a really good game. It is an interesting way to get way from Death Fog :D

Had a lot of fun with this game. Running away feels smooth and gathering and placing letters is really easy. The graphics style is very good and helps makes the whole thing feel complete. I hope you guys expend on this game, I'd love to play it!

Woo that was tough. My biggest complaint is that it generated combinations of letters that i couldn't possible think of a three letter word that could even exist with those two being the first and last letters. there's definitely a lot of RNG involved, which isn't a bad thing. I just ran into situations where with the letters it gave me, there wasn't anything i could do.

@blobo Thanks! Yeah we thought about that and intended on implementing a "reroll" feature where you could trade 3 letters for a new random letter but alas we ran out of time. Such is life in a 72 hour game jam :).

what a clever idea! it was fun and I really like the visuals! i'd like to have seen longer words and a little more variation with the obstacles, but nice work! the game felt pretty polished for a jam game.

@blobo it was super hard to find a text dictionary to use that didn't have acronyms, if we expand on this we will probably find a way to get words that aren't acronyms. and Thanks!

http://www.auggodoggogames.com/games/deathfogdash/

@Reign if you make it to around 10 blocks you start seeing 5 letter words, and then its around 20 that you see 6 letter words. Wish I had time to implement words with multiple holes.

I enjoyed the general art theme, and the two genres you picked clashed just enough to make it work well. The animations and UI look polished too.
Maybe I was doing something wrong, but it felt like I could keep running for quite a while and I wouldn't have to put a letter down until I needed to. As others have said, some of the three letter words were hard to guess - it makes sense if there were acronyms.
I never got to see longer words, so it could have been nicer if that happened earlier.

Game looks really good and sounds good. My only issue is the RNG is a little brutal at times, and i was blocked in by cars at the start the first three times.

Not bad at all! The genre selection was great and the art was decent. The only issue is that the RNG was a bit harsh at times. Otherwise, great work!

Cool Graphics. This is the new innovation of spelling quiz. Good Job. I love it!

Very nice idea and implementation!

I had trouble matching letters with words though - are the words supposed to be English words or is there some reference I'm missing? I matched a T between a R and an E, is RTE supposed to be a word?

Sometimes I would get stuck with one letter and one word and the letter didn't match :-)

I guess the procedural level generation could use some improvements. I'd try something like this (this is probably similar to what you did, I'm also aware that this being a game jam procedural stuff is tough to get right)

- place the word blocks;
- place the car blocks;
- remove blocks until the map is sufficiently connected/disconnected;
- place the middle letters in crates accessible from the areas where the player is;
- place some random letters in crates.

"Sufficiently connected/disconnected" - you could break the map in 2x2 or 3x3 blocks and isolate the blocks with walls (cars) and doors (words). Place the keys (middle letters) in blocks on both sides of doors.

Fog: it would be nice if it would progress in a mono-dimensional manner, a la FTL. Maybe you already did this, I was quite busy trying to figure out words to also figure out the way the fog works.

Movement should be more fluid IMO: rounded corners/colliders for corners, pushing into the edge of the road should also let you progress, but slower etc.

Again, this is a very nice game, would love to play a more developed version.

I died and died. Maybe cause im german and did not know what you wanted me to do :)

Awesome idea though, will keep trying at the weekend.

@mbrezu unfortunately the dictionary file we used was filled with acronyms however the word I believe you were after is RUE. Regardless, thank you for the review!

The fog did only move in one direction and if you toggled the minimal on it would tell you which way to go.

Other suggestions were noted. We appreciate everything you have says. Thanks!

Nicely done! The sound really helped take the tone of the game to a new level.

The controls took some getting used to, but after the initial learning, were responsive and fit the game-feel really well.

@theArtifacts I think this concept could have worked better if each bridge/roadblock had all blank letters and you had to create the entire word yourself. The diagonal movement bothered me a bit, but that's just the nature of isometric games, so you're fine there. In general I think you did a good job. The art looks really nice. I want to play a life sim in this map (minus the fog and the gaps in the road of course) lol. I got trapped in a section of the world that took me too long to backtrack through to find another way around so I was consumed by the fog. But I kind of enjoyed the impending doom, waiting for my inevitable end trapped between a car and the edge of the city. Good work!

Thanks @Kindred . Was my first game release and first ldjam combined into one. I appreciate the suggestions and will take what I've learned into the next project. P.s. did you try 3rd person view by toggling with t? 😉

The visuals were really impressive. Music and sounds a bit loud by default but suited the mood you attempted to set. Would have liked the options menu on the main menu, not just in game. The concept is good, and I can imagine it would be even more fun if the words produced were a little more conventional (I know you've mentioned this in your description, so don't worry) - and also if there was a way to balance the difference in obstacles from run to run - to make each run through a little more consistent in terms of difficulty. A lot of content and impressive options / views for a jam!

@honest-dan Thanks man, and yea, if we threw any time into this, post-jam, I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of areas we would finish. Getting stuck between two cars at spawn is not ideal... but, you've got to admit it's entertaining at this stage, haha.

Dang that's pretty cool idea there. never thought about putting those 2 things together but well done.

awesome concept, nice visuals! I like how the the rythmic music fits in with the sound effects.. I did not see the actual dog ?

This was a very interesting take on the theme! I really enjoyed the bizarre gameplay of needing to collect letters and then play scrabble while running away from impending doom haha :joy: Nice work!

I can't play your game since it depends on scroll wheel and my laptop only has a trackpad, and I don't have a mouse handy. But it looks interesting!

Fun! That was a smart mash up! Well done. My best score was 498, 14 blocks travelled and a total distance of 651.

@csanyk actually the scroll wheel is just an option. You can click on the inventory or use the number keys above the qwerty to select tiles.

@CameronPenner Nice! Thanks for the review! Question for you.. did you start running into 4 or 5 letter words?

I really like the text word approach to the bridges. That was cool! Art is also top notch!!!

I only got to 3 letter words.

Wow, it took me far too long to understand what to do, but I managed to figure it out after a few tries ;) At first I was under the assumption that I needed a letter from either side of the gaps and was puzzled as to why that didn't work. Also, in the video, I misquoted the title of the game for half a dozen times until I realized it -- despite reading it! xD

Apart from those aforementioned personal issues, I found it very original and the presentation was very polished and concise. Also, the 3rd person view with the mini-map is a nice touch and gives the game a more claustrophobic mood.

Great job!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUjvukr54GQ

I started out, ran into P_H and what letters even make a word out of P_H? Not any of the ones in my rack, certainly! Then I ran to the left and encountered D_V. Err... and I am confined to running on the street, I can't even walk on the grass? The GRASS is an obstacle?! Grr. Well, I smashed a couple boxes but couldn't make any progress with any of the letters.

What can I say? We did what we could for our first game jam, coding from scratch, in 72 hours. Better luck next time. @csanyk .