Gridwords by ixchow

made by ixchow for Ludum Dare 45 (COMPO)

"Gridwords", a game by Jim McCann / TCHOW llc where you move letters around so that they cover stars, with the caveat that you can only move letters that are parts of words, and you can only move them to places that are also parts of words.

Controls: Click and drag. Use the buttons in the lower left and right to reset and undo, respectively.

You can edit the URL to skip levels, if you really want to. There aren't that many, though.

I don't often make word games, and I don't often see word games in Ludum Dare, so I figured it was a good time to change that up a bit. I welcome comments and suggestions through either the Ludum Dare interface or the contact methods listed on my web page.

Made with Javascript and WebGL and no libraries or frameworks! (Though a lot of example code from 15-466: Computer Game Programming came in handy.)

Models created in blender; the font is "Cantata One" used under SIL Open Font License.

More information about sources available on the github page.

Youtube	https://ixchow.github.io/gridwords/
Youtube	https://github.com/ixchow/gridwords
Original URL	https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/gridwords

Ratings

Overall	160^th	3.609⭐	25🧑‍⚖️
Fun	176^th	3.413⭐	25🧑‍⚖️
Innovation	49^th	3.978⭐	25🧑‍⚖️
Theme	105^th	3.848⭐	25🧑‍⚖️
Graphics	183^th	3.5⭐	25🧑‍⚖️
Given		25🗳️	10🗨️

Feedback

Lomt1k

07. Oct 2019 · 01:36 UTC

Not bad.

I like it!

Alex Ferbrache

07. Oct 2019 · 01:42 UTC

Interesting take on a puzzle game, I enjoyed it! Would love to see more puzzles with other words.

Kazatan

07. Oct 2019 · 01:42 UTC

I got very confused at what the rules where. It might be nice to have more of a tutorial/hints on the first few puzzles.

![ixchow.github.io_gridwords__3.png](///raw/f55/72/z/26bac.png)

I couldn't get past this :thinking:

Looks really nice though :thumbsup:

*Edit: I've just got the fact you can move more than one at a time :face_palm: *

superunknown

07. Oct 2019 · 01:43 UTC

Enjoyed it! Interesting take on the theme and the puzzles were challenging.

Jeremy Ryan

07. Oct 2019 · 01:44 UTC

Neat game! It took me a while to get a hang of the puzzles, but it's really impressive how much variety you managed to get, considering the initial state was always "nothing."

CooperJKnapp

07. Oct 2019 · 01:47 UTC

Great concept, fun word game

Owen Shriver

07. Oct 2019 · 02:24 UTC

Takes some getting used to, but this is really cool. A great combination of a word game and a spacial puzzle.

🎤 ixchow

07. Oct 2019 · 02:49 UTC

@kazatan this was also a problem for my playtester; I think the constraint of always starting with 'nothing' was a big problem in putting together a level to teach the idea.

I went so far as to put support for help text into the engine, but decided to comment it out because I'd rather show than tell. (Look in '[levels.js](https://github.com/ixchow/gridwords/blob/master/levels.js)'.)

walaber

07. Oct 2019 · 03:15 UTC

I got really confused by the rules... perhaps a bit more feedback about what's happening to make a move illegal would help. Also I agree that the theme interpretation is clever, but the word "nothing" might be making your first level(s) a bit more difficult that ideal.

TheseusInABottle

07. Oct 2019 · 04:31 UTC

I'm not that great of a scrabble player but this is really quite the interesting puzzle game. Certainly makes great use of the theme and is pretty fun. Personally I'm not one for word games most of the time but this was pretty enjoyable to try and struggle my way through a couple puzzles.

appix

07. Oct 2019 · 04:56 UTC

interesting word game，nice idea！

MaggardJosh

07. Oct 2019 · 05:14 UTC

This was a fun entry! I don't think I *quite* understood the rules, sometimes I would think the tiles should move because I have valid words but they wouldn't. Despite that I made it to the 'Crawlers' level.

Overally I really liked this entry!