I was not able to kill even one monster:D It is hard.
But i like the idea. God job!

Cool concept! I died just before the exit but I was still able to leave and was still on the ground in the next level. I like the idea of typing hit to fight enemies, its almost like your are casting a spell on them

@wallie thanks for trying it out! What do you think was making it hard? Aiming the letters to hit the target? Typing quickly? Something else?

Both :)
Is aiming through open doors working? I had a feeling that i was throwing "hit" on the door

@wallie yeah, open doors are still "solid" in the game, so they block letters :( Gotta fix that in the post-jam version!

Really cool idea, like really cool. The gameplay ended up complicated, but its worth getting used to it. Good job man!

My favorite thing is something you may have not even planned, **shooting alt characters!!!**


@ARuculaDoMal Haha! That's so great. I love it when game systems leave stuff open enough for unexpected things to happen. :D

Loved it. I'm a fast typer, so I felt some sense of power :)

Movement was a little "floaty." And I would have liked some indicator when I was doing damage vs. if I was missing or typing wrong. And of course it's a jam, but more content, like chests, would have been nice, and maybe additional combat moves for combos (like punch, fire, shoot, etc.) Or maybe even longer phrases and sentences to pull off spells and the like. :) Those are directions if you continue to develop the game.

Good job over all!

This game is a really cool idea, although in the web version when moving with arrow keys it would spam the text to shoot rapidly causing lag. Also I think a nice change to the combat would be to type out your command and then press enter to shoot it. Overall the game was fun and the concept was well executed, good job guys!

Thanks for your thoughts @jamgrrl! I feel you on your comments re floaty movement and clearer indicators. And yeah! I really want to keep building out the game. How fun would it be to type "super powerful skull smash" at a monster and get a big gratifying damage bonus? Thanks!

@MrBreadMan Thank you! Woah, I like your idea about typing out commands in a 'staging area' or something before using it. This could make the visuals a bit less noisy. Good thought!

This is really cool! I think I got down 5 or 6 levels. Is this procedural generation? Also, it may seem kinda shallow, but the typing animation is top notch! I'm not sure how easy or hard it was to do that, but it looks amazing!

I wanted to play a while longer than I was able to, holding the arrow keys caused for example "ArrowUp" to get shot so often my browser (Firefox) started lagging. Even in lower resolution. I think using the arrow keys without shooting them would work better. Or maybe even typing "forward"/"left"/"right" and "stop". Would have followed the theme and added some difficulty.

@benhumphries I spent a lot of time getting the typing "feel" just right, so it warms my heart that you noticed. :) And yes, the levels are procedurally generated!

@Lakrits Woah, Firefox shoots arrow keys?! This is what I get for only testing on Chromium! I deployed an emergency fix if you'd like to try it out without this (crippling) bug. Sorry I messed that up! Glad you spoke up!

Cute graphics for a dungeon. It would have lot of posibilities by adding more commands to be used :D
For that, this idea is great. Congratulations!

Thanks for the kind words @siuler-lm. I'm also jazzed about a post-jam version that explores the wide vocabulary possible!

great take on the theme! dang charmanders behind every door hithithithihtihihith :smile:

@tweedle Thanks! You're also the SECOND person to interpret the mobs as dinosaurs or pokemon! Once was a coincidence, but it seems like there's a dual interpretation thing. Here's it is with tweaks, to be less ambiguous:


I just tried the link to your game but I get connection refused?

Edit: Nevermind it's working again!

This game has a great feel to it. You are on to something here. The letters bouncing off the walls or attaching to the doors just feels right. I wasn't sure if I hit the pokesaurs or if they were hitting me. Apparently I did something right because I got to level 5 or maybe 6 before my hits got stuck in a door and I died. Was hoping for an endgame and some more commands to type. +1 for coding in vim. ;)

A fun little game with potential!

@mashas Thank you! Thanks for trying the server again. Very useful feedback. I'm jazzed to keep on hacking on this too. :)

BTW, GolfZ is *so great*!

Your link says the site can't be reached

@paul-avallone Fixed! Server ran out of memory. Should be up now. :)

This is fun! I definitely would've taken this over the different spelling games of my childhood.

Game lags hard when I type (in web browser), maybe I am typing too fast? It also seemed to have been inputting my 'backspace' as a 'backspace' and not as a: I just spelled open with two n's and I'm looking to backspace one of them. After reading the comments, I'm genuinely interested? Do you ping a server for the words? Does that mean there is a certain level of flexibility in typing the words? I'd really like to play the game in a less laggy state.

Nice little game with some problems, e.g. you can look through walls, you bounce back from stuff when you collide, the lighting seems a little off. But typos in this game hurt just as much as in real life (for me at least). :D

@legavroche Thanks for trying it out. The text is all made up of vectorized letters, so generating new letters and text produces noticable lag (bummer). As for the server: nope, it's just a static web server that's serving up the html and js. What browser did you use and how recent is your machine? Surprised you're having trouble as I'm using a pretty old $200 machine!

@vinterskog Thanks for the comments. Lots of stuff I can polish up for a post-jam version. :)

This game is really well executed. I love the way the words shoot out and explode into triangles. I wish the doors did't follow you because you can see through a crack into the next room if you stand at an angle. If you expand upon the game I would love to see different types of enemies and maybe some chests or power ups. Adding music and sound effects would also be great. If you type hit too fast it registers as hithit and doesn't do any damage. I would love if their was more things to type in the game. The 3 bars on your display are very original. I love the pixel art. I like how when you are close to death the heath bar springs faster. Great job

I enjoyed playing this! I got to level 2, but I think I was unlucky because there was nowhere else to explore. I tried again, now I had some more doors, but less enemies. ;) I liked how the letters fly, but it took me a while to see that I actually shoot the letters to a door or enemy.

Some small things: When I didn't aim my letters at anything in particular, the letters would sometimes have a weird movement in the end. Often I was too fast, resulting in 'hithit', and I also hat the open door 'hit' problem. The doors move funny when you walk through.

Very interesting concept, and a great take on the theme. I missed the mouse control to look around, this make a little bit confusing to play at first, but after some while I got it.
The enemy is pretty difficult to kill, needing to type several times to kill. I think this need some balance.
I liked the art style combining pixel art with 3D too. Good job here!

Take a look a my game too: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/confessional

Nice game. Simple graphics that did the job, nice adherence to the theme! Lack of sound and music is the only thing that let it down, but I know as well as anyone how sound/music end up being sacrificed in a game jam...

I really like the game concept. The letters flying around to hit the things I was interacting with felt really good, and the graphics were very nice. Well done!

Nice concept, nice feedbacks.

Really nice concept! I liked the art style, very retro but still polished. The feedbacks are well done too, but I couldn't help to notice that the text sometimes is "inside" objects, like when you try to open the door, causing a flickering effect.

Another interesting aspect of the game is the exploration. The environment feels mysterious yet threatening.

Congratulations on the project!

We also did a game using typing mechanics. If you are interested you can check it at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/type-n-jump

The monsters have WAAYYYYY too much health, I was beginning to wonder if I was even doing damage. It ended up being a better strategy to just run away. Otherwise, it was very fun.

@paul-avallone Wow, great eye! You noticed a lot of the little things. Thank you for the feedback. I'm hacking on a post-jam version that's live-updated via another link by the downloads section. Thanks so much!

@papaver Thanks for playing & writing back!

@rodrigo-denubila Thanks for playing & writing back. Yeah I *really* wanted mouselook too, but mouselook works best with WASD controls, which are of course dedicated to the typing mechanic. I'm totally open to having mouselook though if you can think of a way to do it :)

@infinitycore Ha yeah a lot of people mentioned the enemies feeling tough. What I think happens is that the enemies "stack" on each other, so it looks like one enemy. The post-jam version is going to have collisions between mobs, so they don't pile up on each other. Thank you for playing!

Really loved this game mechanics!
Shooting words feels amazing. It also feels that these are the base mechanics for a much greater game! It would been awesome to use these word powered skills to do some slightly more DnD stuff, like levers, or puzzles.
Awesome job indeed! Congratulations!

Come and try my game! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/tactical-hydra

Eventually I realized dungeons are generated, I must have went 20+ levels down hoping there is an end game. I think you proved the concept can run smooth as a game, gj, all that is missing is a large variety of interactive objects to justify the text interface. Randomly generated puzzles would get me excited as well. Firing letters works smooth. It is kind of close to how brains work, we think of an action while focusing on object. The monsters are too cute to be killed but oh well.

I really enjoyed this entry. I really enjoyed the transfer of the letters onto the targets. I thought it was slick and satisfying well done.

I love the idea of this, and I think with more depth, this concept could work as a legitimate full scale game. That being said, I think this iteration of the game is sadly lacking in a lot of the potential depth this could easily achieve.

Because OPEN and CLOSE both appear to have infinite range (so long as your letters can reach their target) it took me about 5-10 minutes of kiting an enemy before I realized I wasn't dealing any damage to it, and had to wait for it to get very close before I saw those damage values ticking. The game could definitely use some way of better illustrating that HIT has a limited range. Judging from the comments, I don't think I was the only one who struggled to realize this.

One other nitpick I had was that it felt awkward going back and forth from regular typing to the arrow keys. I'm sure the player could eventually get used to it, but something about it just felt a bit off/odd as it was.

Other than that, the game was just very simple. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing for games, but this is the type of game that absolutely could benefit from plenty of depth. I really do hope you can expand upon this more than what's in the post-jam version (how do you eat the apples, and what does SLAM do?), as I do think this could be a novel addition to the Dungeon Crawler genre.

@MufinMcFlufin Thank you for the very detailed comments. Your noting some of the points I've heard before further convinces me of the important bits to get right in the post-jam version.

Re going back and forth between arrow keys and typing: yeah, it's kind of awkward isn't it? I am oh so very open to suggestions here. It's a part I'll continue to ponder on; uniting the two input interfaces is the dream!

Really enjoyed your entry. Would like to see the concept expanded with more words to use, or unlocking new words as you level up, and things of that nature. Nice entry. :)

Nice game! I admit, switching between arrow keys and typing was kinda hard for me, but once I got the hang of it, things were easier.

I do say though, the horizontal line in the middle of the dungeon tiles was giving me a bit of a fit, visually. I would have slightly raised (or lowered) the viewpoint to keep that seam from being obvious.