it's so great!! one of the funiest i ever played. loved the bunny spider thing

Really love the weird rabbit and the music, can't say I knew all the words I placed tho!

Great game! I love everything! It was such a fun experience and somewhat educational! I wouldn't even guess it was made in 48 hours!

Super interesting game! Very well polished and such a unique concept! I do feel as if some of the words are...well not words and the definitions rarely matched up with what was put, but overall very fun! The music was also incredible! Great game!

@plixel Umm, definitions not matching how? As it it's showing a word that wasn't found? Or the definition being nonsense? And was it in the English one (the sources are different for en/others)? In English version the definition will be randomly picked from all definitions so sometimes it will show more obscure definitions instead of the most common one (that you probably had in mind). It will also pick just one of the possible multiple word you match per placement and show that definition. And now that I think about it, there is a queue system for the speech bubble messages so the tutorial messages might be visible and hence postponing the definition showing up ie. making them be kinda off sync with the just placed letter which might be the cause of your confusion too.

And yeah, the dictionaries are far from perfect... 😅

Love, love, love this.
So incredibly fun and polished.
Will keep playing this for sure.

This is great! I loved how my game stared very strategic, and by the end just became a letter orgy :') speaking of...


If this isn't LD50 winning material I don't know what is..

Wow, great work! Very clean and very fun. I did run into an occasional issue where it wouldn't let me place letters...but I was always able to work around it. The rabbit with the long legs will haunt my dreams, but the overall look was super pleasing and satisfying to interact with. The twists were a super cool way to mix things up and keep the game alive. The music and sounds also fit very nicely, put this whole thing in an app and ship it!

Great entry ! Well Done !

Great UX design. Almost hard to believe someone pulled the entire thing off in just two days!

@mook Haha nice! The random definition picks can indeed sometimes result in some surprising funnies.

@foxwater Hmm, might be the fact that the letter placing is locked when the scoring is still going on for the previous placement. So I think it was just you trying to play "too fast" for the game to keep up with. Gotta keep it linear so it won't mess up the multipliers and so on. Well at least it recovered and didn't cause any soft locks.

Very fun game! Love the fact that you can pick from different dictionaries :D

Great idea/concept! I enjoyed playing it and feel it could be a complete product. I ran into an issue where I stopped being able to place letters.

@pinky-toast Did you use undo? You must place the undoed letter again before you can use others. The bunny mentions it too. Other than that the only thing that blocks letter placing is when it's still racking points for the previously placed letter and there *shouldn't* be a way to that to get stuck.

@antti-haavikko I did use undo :o I must have missed that. I tried each letter and I didn't see any of them working, maybe make the undo-ed letter shake/be a different color or otherwise make it more obvious that you can only use that letter for now? I don't know for sure that I tried each letter, but I remember trying.

@pinky-toast Yeah might have been a good idea to make it more clear. It's now on the right side of the hand with bit of a gap to other letters. And yeah, kinda the double edge of having the bunny blab so much about the word definitions and so on that the more "important" tutorial messages might be missed.

There are some really great choices made in the design of this that weren't necessary to the 'core' game but really add a whole lot (Undo, backwards words, different languages). SO well polished - this could easily be on the app store now, it's a finished product! I've screenshotted my 2nd place on the leaderboard as this game is bound to attract enough players to bump me off soon...

@kemp Thanks! ❤️ Yeah I kinda have my own design philosophy that if something annoys me during dev/testing, it's bound to annoy others too and will do something about it. Couple of slips pretty early on ruining a big word and I knew undo had to be a thing. Same for the "show board button" when picking twists. Just few times of me wondering that what was to board state like anyway when comparing the twist choices was enough.

That is an awesome game ! And it war really cool that I could pick my langage (french) and even if most of the definition didn't makes sense, it was still a big surprise when the rabbit started saying them ! I am always impressed by stuff like that, very cool !

Best ludum dare game, best word game and best browser game. Also game of the year nominee. Hiton hyvän pelin oot tehny!

@puree-adventure Yeah the non English word definitions are pulled from Wiktionary. The API result is full of formatting stuff and other unusable garbage (for this case) so trying to parse something relevant from it wasn't too easy. At its current state it seemed to work quite well on Finnish and I thought it would work similarly on other languages too. I know like three words of French so it was pretty much guess work and the case of *"yup that looks French and vaguely can poinpoint some similarish words there as the key word"*. But yeah, even if it is only relevant just every now and then, it's still a bonus in my books as it doesn't hinder the actual gameplay at all.

I almost made it to the english leaderboard, but I'm really not good at word games. But I learned some new words, even if you're not winning there is something to gain from playing. Not sure if it was intentional but it's a neat touch. I'm going to keep at it until I make it on the leaderboard !

The level of polish here is really impressive, everythin is animated and juicy. Letters snaps, combos are glorious, and almost everything on screen moves and makes sounds. I'm curious as to what proportion of your time was alocated to making it feel so great. Either way : time well spent.

Some negative feedback if I must ?
- The undo is a bit weird as I can only place the same letter I tried to place. Got me good when I accidentaly try to place a Z. I guess it's probably intentionnal from the way it works but can you tell us why ?
- The twist screen is a bit underwhelming standing next to the rest of the game. It should also immediately interrupt the player input, cuz I was still dragging a tile when it appeared.

Now on to the real question : What is the mascot name ? Because it has a lot of appeal and I want a plushy !

There are some super clever word references in this! I love that I was able to use slang and still have it count! I also love the fact that the cute nightmare fuel is never addressed. It simply is. A+

Always excited to see your games pop up on my Itch feed!

As always, the UI and presentation are incredible, especially for a Compo game. The colors, contrast, beady-eyed stick insect rabbit cryptid, little animations, all of it was top notch. Everything, even the banner and the trees in the background, were bobbing to the music.

And the music! The production quality was great, and I still have it stuck in my head as I'm typing this.

*:musical_note: Nostrils and tomato :musical_note:*

The gameplay was familiar but fresh. It was simultaneously more forgiving than Scrabble, etc. since you're allowed to place letters that don't form words yet, but it's also more punishing to accidentally drop a tile in the wrong place and lose the 10x bonus until you fix it (adding the Undo button was a good decision).

All this said, I do have some (very minor) criticisms:

- Sometimes through bad luck you ended up with too many vowels or consonants, which really limited placement choice. I don't know if you're currently weighing draws to try to even out the types of letters you get, but if not, it might help.

- The interpretation of the theme was perfectly acceptable, but not particularly inspiring. I did like the variety of power ups which added some strategy (although I rarely if ever used the "delay the inevitable" one).

- I think the gameplay is slightly "breakable." I found a strategy I'm fairly confident is the optimal one, but I won't share it quite yet so as not to ruin the experience for others (tee-hee!).

Overall, amazing entry, and I look forward to seeing how you score and all your other titles moving forward.


(As a side note, what software/equipment do you use for music and sound effects?)

Yipee! 8th in the world (currently)! Nicely polished game. Working leaderboards. Overall, great fun!

A really polished and well thought out game, well done.

That was extremely complete and well polished. Fantastic work.

@garazbolg2 This isn't by first my first word game and I think when I was making my second one (in English too), I had that *"that can't be a word, what does it mean"* moment too many times so I knew I had to introduce a word definition system. So yes, it being somewhat educational too is indeed intended.

Hard to say how much time goes to juice and polish but it is a major thing for me really. I usually juice stuff as I add them so there is no separate dev phase for it for me. As a reference, here is what the game looked like on Saturday evening after about 12 hours of dev time. The second day was mainly leaderboards, word definitions, audio stuff and overall polish.

https://youtu.be/UYw61u4WOmA

Undo is only meant for fixing slip ups really. It locks you to that letter because it has already drawn a new one and should not be used to peek at what's coming. Even though now you can somewhat cheese with it and check word validities.

Bunny has no name, just legs. Kinda funny how some people find it cute while others like @everythingisbacon and @jeremy-ryan think it's creepy. It ended up like that in a weird iterative process. I had no design in mind for it at the start, just added a body shape and added some legs to it. Picked the color palette of the whole game at that point, the yellow balanced the blue background nicely here. Then as I always do, I placed a blushing smiley face to it. Wanted to make it look more like an animal so I drew the snout shape and slapped it on. Looked too weird, added in whiskers and the beard tufts. Then it was time to add in the ears and for some reason went with the longer variety of ear locking it to the bunny genus.

@jeremy-ryan I do mention the software used in the description. It's GarageBand for music and Audacity for recordings. Been thinking of making the leap to Logic Pro though as the limitations of GarageBand are really starting to irk me. Also been thinking of purchasing a midi controller for like couple of years now but never got around to it.

Now I'm interested to know about that secret scoring strategy of yours. That seems like a lot of points compared to the next spot. Could you DM/email me or something?

Yeah pretty much hated the theme this time around. I don't do theme slaughter rounds or votings at all anymore cause they always end up disappointing as there is something better there than what ends up being chosen. So for this theme, there are two cookie cutter interpretations, the game mechanic one and the story one. As a game mechanic, it's pretty much what every arcade style game always does. I don't really do story games so that's not a good option either. But yeah, then there are the clever and innovative interpretations which I was drawing complete blanks for. And haven't played any game yet that does so either in a 5/5 way.

Oh and @jeremy-ryan the letters picks are indeed kinda weighted. It actually picks a random word from the dictionary, shuffles the letters of it and every time a letter is requested, it gives one of those letters. And when the word runs out, it picks a new one etc. So the letters should kinda closely follow the natural distribution of letters in that language. Of course you can still end up using the "easy" letters too much and then the harder ones keep piling up. This happens to me quite a lot in Finnish that I run out of vowels as short ~4 words use too many of them compared to longer words.

I guess this is far enough down the comment chain it's probably just fine to say the strategy.

I did the following:
- Identify as long of a word as possible, with as many "inner" words as possible, and a common letter at the center, from my starting tiles (for my game, this was "SCORERS," getting ORE, CORE, CORER, CORERS, SCORE, SCORER, SCORERS)
- Build out that word, but crucially, leave out the middle letter.
- Identify a second word that intersects that middle letter, and build it out intersecting the first, leaving out the second letter (I did "STARTED" if I remember right, intersecting on "R")
- Fill the remainder of the board. Importantly, make sure you include all letters you've placed so far in valid words to get the bonus as soon as possible.
- Any time you're offered an upgrade, pick the one that increases bonus multiplier.
- Save a copy of the letter you need to finish the two intersecting words as you approach the end, then place it on your last turn.

The way the multiplier system works greatly incentivizes stacking the multipliers, especially with the upgrades. As such, one very good turn will dwarf the amount of points you get from all other turns. My game I got well over 100,000 points in the last turn, and I think I got another 30,000 from another lucky "long" word I formed in the margin.

@jeremy-ryan Oh damn, that's gaming! 😎 Nothing super secret I didn't really know of. Never though about leaving the carefully planned big scorer words to the end though. Dunno if you considered checking for backwards words too as only getting the max number of words matters to raise the multiplier. Both of your example words have very limited words in that direction. Is trat/trats a word or is rat the only backwards one in both of them?

@antti-haavikko Roc and rocs as well. It's definitely possible to get higher with a better choice of words and better luck, but the fact I doubled the top score after trying the strategy once made me assume nobody had done it.

Regardless, a great game, and it was a pleasure to try to optimize it!

lovely game. I learnt new words, too!

This one's really well polished. I do suspect that it's a tad bit harder in Finnish than in English :sweat_smile: Where did you get the dictionaries? I'm not used to seeing word definitions popping up on word games, so that was a cool feature.

@arzi Can't really remember where I got em from. I've made several word games and been using the same dictionaries since the first one. They're all just plain text files with a list of words. The word definitions are then pulled from two different APIs, dictionaryapi.dev for the English one and Wiktionary for the rest.

Yeah and it's a lot easier in English in comparison to Finnish at least. I scored pretty much 5-10k on the Finnish one but even casually trying the English one I managed to pull off 30k. The English dictionary is more complete which helps and they have way more 3/4 letter words which is a major deal in building up the multiplier and scoring big.

I didn't expect to spend so long playing this game. You've come across a really interesting mix-up to the crossword puzzle genre. Full of charm in a playful atmosphere. Not much in the way of criticism other than the game seems to run somewhat slowly. But that didn't really do much to detract from the fun. Well done.

@bitdecay That's weird, someone commented on itch about the slowness too. On the downloaded version even. Was yours the browser one? What kind of specs do you have? It does run silky smooth on all my machines which all aren't the most performant ones. For example the browser version even has no hiccups running on iPad.

Got bored and made a script to try to determine the best-scoring word for a single turn, and my calculation pointed to "REVERTS," so I tried again until I could get the letters for two overlapping. Scored 235,000!

Hello! I like how you used the theme and the game is pretty original and polished.

Wow this game has some polish! I had a lot of fun playing through this, it's probably the best game I've played so far in LD50. I'm impressed that you managed to do this on the Compo timeline as well. I can't point to anything in particular that felt unfinished; everything feels like it has love and attention given to it, including the spider bunny with its permanent smile. I was really pleased with my "Bombers/Sisters" combo in this game and the game rewarded me proportionally with the points it gave; everything felt really balanced. I never really felt like I was running out of good letters until my very last letter; everything else in the board was lit green. Only gripe that I have if any is that on the desktop version, I don't think my score updated to the leaderboard, but oh well. Additionally, the definitions coming in from what I guess is an API feel really strange at times, but that's hardly the games fault. In fact, seeing it come out of that creatures mouth makes it almost make sense.

Anyways, awesome game! I'm definitely showing it off to my friends.

@smubear Yeah the definitions are pulled from an API and I’m displaying a radom definition of all available so sometimes it ends up showing a very obscure word definition even if the same word would have some common ones.

Super polished and well thought out game! Hard to find many flaws with the game, which is especially impressive considering this is a compo entry (only thing I might like to see is some more diversity for the twists)! Easy to understand and play, and great interpretation of the theme.

Favourite part is when you place down a letter to form a word, and then it turns out that it also forms a bunch of other words you didn't even consider :upside_down:

I had a good time with this, reminds me of the table top game Bananagrams. It felt really good to score points, especially when I accidently spelled another word! Lots of polish and juice. Just jamming to the music and spelling words.

I feel like the random obscure definitions are a feature not a bug, they add a lot of humor to the game (and I think I accidentally learned things :smile:)

I definitely want this on my mobile!

@eonarheim Oh it's definitely intentional and not a bug! It'd be boring to see the most common definition every time. Sure it now sometimes shows some super obscure ones too but also has a bigger chance of teaching something you didn't actually know which I consider a major bonus.

This is as good as it gets when it comes to jam games, it could be basically sold as it is and nobody would complain, excellent job!

Wow! Such a unique twist on word games. It's amazing what people can do over the course of a weekend.

This is the best game I've played so far! Everything is so well put together - the visuals are nice and bouncy, the music is catchy, the gameplay is super fun and interesting!

Incredible game! The polish is absurdly good from the companion character to the animated tiles to the music. Very well done!

Edit: And the character watches your mouse! This is too good!

Crossword type of games were never my genre, but I really like this entry. The idea to display the meaning of some words is great. I think I will use it a bit to improve my spanish :-)

Really great game! Very well polished and tons of great touches such as the definition for each word! Really amazing work!

This was super fun and really well polished! Loved the music and little voice. The art and UI are ultra clean. The feedback is nice and juicy. Amazing that you guys got all the language options and leaderboard in there. This would be a great mobile game!

@strega Thanks! It’s compo btw so just me. 😎 Actually having language options is super simple, just swap the dictionary file. The word definitions were more work as they’re using two different APIs and parsing the wiktionary format was a nightmare. 😅 I’ve also done leaderboards so many times that it’s really a piece of cake for me. And I do have same already functional backend for them I use everywhere.

Even more impressive to be a compo game! Maybe I should look into simple leaderboard setups for future jam games...

The music dying at the end was awesome

Amazing work! Congrats on the #1 placement!

Awesome! You really deserve that #1

congrats on first . i came 1404

Coming to this a little late... very enjoyable. Breaks many assumptions I have about how word games should work, and yet it still works. A well deserved win.

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nice

The game came out super polished, I can't believe it was done in a game jam, especially with the amount of words it successfully found

Thanks for the info I will try to figure it out for more.

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i loved playing it!!