Sent my friends a link and they liked it

It's a simple concept, but it is enjoyable arranging the letters.

It's nice that the game autosaves, I've completed a few areas but there's still a long way to go. I might come back to it when I want to chill out :)

Great idea for this years theme! Very relaxing and fun to play! Good job!

Such an addicting little game, reminded me of Sudoku with words. Great use of the jam's theme and I really like the color schemes you chose for when you get a new word. The UI was also very intuitive and the music was pleasant. Thanks for having the game save progress, since I'm currently stuck on level 24 haha.

Please post a web or mac build so more people can play and give feedbacks on your game! :D

Thanks for the feedback, people. I knew adding a save system in this kind of game was a must. ^^

@danilo-freire I'd like to post a Web build, but when I tried it out, it turned out it acts completely goofy. I mean, some differences between web and desktop builds are expected, but when the game carries the click state to the newly created buttons (which doesn't happen on desktop build) or when it makes NaN of page number when I try to get to the previous page (I don't even know where *that* came from... it's just a simple subtraction), I feel it would take too much effort to get a working Web build with GameMaker. >.<

(I was planning to learn Haxe anyway, so I might end up recreating the game with that; but that's beyond the Jam scope)

As for the Mac version, I'm afraid I can't afford a Mac to test builds at the moment... ^^'

Hey, nice take on the theme! I like this king of games so I had fun finding the words. It took me some time to figure out how to use the little numbers in the boxes. Maybe some explaining would help? Anyway, great game, good job!

funny game great job !

Finally something completely different done with the theme!
Excellent idea, well done :)

This is definitely start with "Nothing" :smile: There are a lot of words too! I only got to 20% though. I think it's nice there are many words to play, but I think it lacks of Feels what games should have, I mean something like transition when the letters exchange places, or SFX when clicking on the letters.

Overall, nice work! Great job!

I absolutely love this in every way! It's got a clever take on the theme, it's got a great moody soundtrack and it's perfectly implemented.

I love how "hard" words are actually easier to spot because of the stranger point scores. I love the way each set of levels introduces just enough new letters to mess with your strategies and make you rethink how you solve the puzzles. The interface, while not super shiny, worked in every way I wanted it to. I could swap letters within my row as well as to and from the board, so I never felt like I was fighting with the controls.

The only thing that confused me was the lower-tier 'T's thing, but it wasn't a major issue.

There are a good couple games centered around letters; and yet they're all so unique!

At first I wondered, hey where's the music? Then it hit me. And it hit me good :^D The small particles in the background added to the details :thumbsup_tone4:

I love the criteria set out for each new area, as well as the layers of importance for each letter and the number system to go with it.

At first I thought the progress bar was bugged but then I realized there really are that many levels like "woah this a whole finished game!"

Thanks again for the feedback, everyone.

@ahistyap Good suggestions about the game feel (or juice or whatever). After I implemented drag-and-drop letter swaps, I pretty much kept using it and the click-and-click swap fell out of my focus - I agree that having a little tween would improve the general feedback and aesthetics of this swap. I wanted to make SFX for letters clicking or other events, but I got other things to do and I really wanted to include the music. That, and there was one very important SFX I had to include for a particular level.

@jamioflan Thanks for the warm review. If I make a full version, I think I will get rid of the upper-tier/lower-tier words mechanics in favour of other conditions, such as "at least one letter from this word must be used" or "you need to use letters from at least two words", or maybe have different letter-number mappings in some levels to shake things up a bit (one alternative mapping I consider right now is old cellphone keyboard, i.e. ABC for 1, DEF for 2, PQRS for 7 etc.).

simply cool^^

A really interesting idea, and really well polished. I also love how much content there is. I know most people don't like mobile games, and I am probably the same, but I think this could work really well on phones!

Great job making this!

I see a cool idea for a game and a lot of tiny improvements and quality of life things that most people wouldn't think about adding. Highlighting the slots for letters, having to click few times to reset progress and unlocking a hint after a while - very cool.

Congrats on this entry :)

That was fun, and right up my alley. Nice!

Had some suspicion before playing due to lots of rubbish games out there, but was quite surprised!
I like how you add something to every word (like 'hint' not much of a use now :D), I was also confused where is the music in the begining, but when it was randomly enabled it was a nice addition to the game. The game is pretty relaxing as it should be.

About the things I would change is maybe play around with different color schemes and resizable window.

In the end, its funny with how much words you can come up from 'Nothing' and the theme is covered here, because well... you start with nothing right?

Good job considering you are a solo dev!

Very chill music and nice graphics! I like that you took a simple concept and really polished it up.

Thanks once again for the feedback.

@tygrak I actually considered making the phone ports at some point, which is why I started off with a small resolution, so that I wouldn't need to haphazardly cram the UI into a smaller space (that said, I've yet to find out what sort of resolution is considered "acceptable minimum" for mobile games).

@anion-z Thank you for your kind review. I'm wondering what you meant by playing around with different colour schemes - I mean, there are 5 colour schemes in the game already, each added with a new word.

I also plan to make the resizable window in the full version - in fact, I wanted to make the UI elements adapt to the screen size, so that larger screen can use higher resolution assets.

@alphish That would be great!
By color schemes I didnt mean that they are not changing, they work perfectly fine and fit as they are right now.
What I really meant is, if you are looking towards improving this game any further you could play around with colors in a specific scheme (choose main color, shift the hue and/or the shade) and see what works best, something juicy and something that pops-out, but at the same time colors should match each other

For the best example look at how colors do their job in @itsdanidre's game! (sorry for the ping itsdanidre)

This quickly grabs user's attention and keeps him/her interested in the game especially since you have more than 1 color scheme already.

@anion-z I see, thanks for clarification. The Jam version has been put together quickly (less than 36 hours of actual development, in fact), so I just defined some 5 core colours and used them as a basis for specific words and the areas introducing specific words.

I suppose in the full version it would be a good idea to have a generic "skin" of sorts, defining background colour, UI colours, words colours, particle effects used and so on. If I put together some simple parameterised prototype or even editor, it should be easy to mass-produce such skins. Since I plan to have some degree of non-linearity and mixing up different combinations of words, an ability to define many skins easily would be definitely helpful.

So yeah, thanks again for bringing my attention to it.

:eyes: @anion-z

This was a surprisingly enjoyable game! I am not usually good at word puzzles but this works quite well. I didn't have time to finish it, but I will probably come back to it. The music is a nice touch, and everything feels really smooth and fair. I do wish there was more descriptions, but I can understand when there isn't enough time. Creative use of the theme, nice work!