some of these words were really crazy. i didnt quite get the word mixing, but i can tell that it was an excellent mechanic added to the word puzzle system. over all this is a really cool game and well put together. its just some of those words are so random at times.

@jcmonkey Yes some of the words are crazy indeed. I have a ~2 megabyte word dictionary where I pick a word that can be spelled with the periodic table elements (starting with 5 letter ones and slowly getting longer each new level). Then from level 3 onwards it starts splitting (by their atomic number) to two different ones with basic math operations. For example Oxygen (atomic number 8) could become Carbon (6) and Helium (2) etc.

The solution doesn't necessarily need to be the same word the puzzle started with, any that is found in the dictionary will work.

Thanks for playing! ❤️

I absolutely loved the art style on this. Really fun idea :)

I love everything about this game from the fun puzzle design to the leaderboard system
Good Job!

Crazy Awesome!

Feels great. Nice juicy animations and great sound.

I don't quite get how to split the elements, but that is a very clever mechanic.

I love word games!

Cheers!

-LB

Very nice

really diffcult!BUT it's so COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

I love that game! The idea of combining names of chemical elements is awesome!

Took some time to understand the balance mechanism but the overall result is very polished, nice work

This is cool but man is it hard!

It's super polished for a compo entry!

As a non native english speaker, the words are really hard to find. Maybe you could split the dictionary into a subset with more simple stuff to generate the levels, and still allow everything as a solution?

The take on the theme is obvious because of the periodic table, but it didn't "feel unstable".

By far the best entry I've seen at the moment!

Really creative premise and clean execution!

The visuals, music, and gameplay worked really well in combination. I'm not sure what the little dudes were doing around the edge eying my cursor, but whatever it was, it was working.

Some of the perfect solutions were a bit out there. If you had more time, or a nicer dataset, it would be nice to limit it to, say, the 5000 most-used words for the puzzle generation (but still allow obscure ones as solutions).

I will say that, once I got the hang of the puzzles, it became a bit trivial to solve them. Save all your Hydrogen, divide duplicates and subtract one-offs to get more Hydrogen, then throw your least-wordy elements into the math blender until you have the pieces of a 3-6 letter word (and multiply all your Hydrogen away). It's definitely one of the more innovative word games I've seen for a Ludum Dare though!

Excellent work for 48 hours.

@jeremy-ryan Dang, nicely done pretty much solving the game! 👍 It was actually quit long into the jam weekend when I discovered the multiply/divide trick with hydrogen to make em disappear. Was then quite aware that one could pretty much go on forever with that and tried thinking of ways to still make players lose lives somehow. But didn't come up with anything and though that at that point maybe they've just earned it. Math op, please nerf! 😎

@owlycode Yeah, a limited more down to earth dictionary set would indeed be good for the puzzle creation. Of course going through the list of hundreds of thousands of words is pretty much out of question though. And using a completely different simpler one could mean that some words might not be in the extended one. Well of course that could be sanitized/checked first just like I do to verify that the word is solvable with the elements.

Thanks a lot of playing and leaving detailed feedback! ❤️

This is a fantastic puzzle game that I am genuinely horrible at! As others have said, some filtering of the word list could be good because some of the solutions were quite obscure. Maybe you could have two lists, one of more common words that would be the intended solution (so penalties for being shorter than this one), and your current expansive list, which allows you to match against the wider word set and gives a point multiplier for finding a word longer than the intended one? Although I guess that would need some mapping between the two lists in the current system, of what common words are in what longer ones. Might end up being too much work, even for a post jam version 😅 Anyway, this is one of the most polished entries I've seen, so kudos to you for making it in just 48 hours!

Some crazy words lol! Really polished game for jam!

Loved the game. I think less health would make it high scoring friendly. It takes ages to just play a one round with current health pool. I got 1000+ on my second round round and that felt like like a really long round already.

Really really great.

Badly I'm not enough good at knowing the elements and at English to know which word I could make x) It always end up with complex words I've ever heard about x)

Other than that, the music is really cool, it kept me attached to the game, the mechanics are so cool, and the aesthetic lovely!

That is a very solid entry! :clap: :clap:

@samuli Yeah, totally! I kinda settled on the 10 hearts early on even before I had to math machine there and sadly didn't realize how infrequent the life loss will be with proper play. I did think about adding other sources of life loss later on than just technically "giving up" and submitting a shorter word. The top one being losing a life when the multiplier ticks down (every minute). I think it would have made it less possible to go on forever as one can now do quite easily with all the proper math tactics and patient word building.

@mathiouza Yeah, me too! 😅 That's kinda the reason I added the word definitions there. Yeah the sample words (from which the puzzle is built from too) can indeed be very complex as quite a few people have mentioned. The submitted answer doesn't need to match it though and as the math machine unlocks, you can blend the elements together in various ways and end up with dozens and dozens of possible "perfect solutions". You don't really need to know the elements to play as the display will tell you what the end result will be so you can just try them out. Of course it doesn't work for longer planning though. And it's secretly a bit of an educational game too! 😎

Cool idea! Very cleanly implemented with nice graphics. For me as a not native english speaker it was a bit difficult. But cool game!

The game was excellent and the soundtrack just right! Congrats, I have no suggestions to make, this was really cool :smile:

I'm nowhere near smart enough to be decent at this but this feels REALLY polished! One of my favorite entries so far for sure! I'm keeping this around.

Pretty good game and obviously a great idea although doesn't have much to do with the theme

Pretty good game and obviously a great idea although doesn't have much to do with the theme

Pretty good game and obviously a great idea although doesn't have much to do with the theme

jesus christ

Incredible! I love the leaderboard, the faces that track the mouse, the interactions, the combiner, the elements and searching for the perfect word. Everything felt good, and even when I made a word that I didn't think was a word, there was a handy definition. Compile for mobile and release. Great entry!

Nice for game for 48h. Really cute user interface, the concept of the game is pretty nice but kinda hard if you don't know your periodic table or you're bad at mental math lol. And to be honest I don't quite see the instability here.
I don't know about the word matching system, but if you made it from scratch hats of.

I think this would make a good mobile game, seems like a cool concept for a casual game to play in the public transports after a long day at University during the winter, you know that time when it's dark early and you just want to get home but the freaking snow slows down everything...

@noethelazydev Yeah I was kinda drawing blanks for the theme so I went with unstable elements/chemistry route. Elements tend to be unstable and the whole elements changing to others was supposed to be that.

I did have the dictionary system ready as I’ve made other word games in the past. So I pretty much had it partially ready for checking if given string is a match or not.

I don't know if I'm bad at this game, not smart enough to play it, or just that it's impossibly hard. Maybe I'm missing a trick. I had a periodic table open. It always seems like there are an infinite amount of options for me to manipulate the letters, and I never got closer to my goal. I just couldn't solve anything really. But damn those characters are cute, this game is polished with nice music and great art. I just wish I could play. Thank you for the game.

Managed to get 3rd — always love a leaderboard for a jam game! The best strategy I could come up with was to compress the letters down as much as I could, avoiding nasty letter pairs where possible, which left a more reasonable trial-and-error space to mess around in. It's definitely hard, but letters getting stuck together within symbols was a nice twist on the word jumble puzzle.

The best game I've played so far from this jam. What a creative idea! It's tricky but you gave us a lot of hearts so it helps to compensate. Cool to have a leader board. And I liked the fine details, like how the text shifts and goes kind of rainbow when you get a good word.

Impressive game! The UI feels snappy and I like all the effects. Very fitting music and the leader board is of course perfect to get motivated to continue. Awesome job!

Wow that is really cool.

"I did have the dictionary system ready as I’ve made other word games in the past. So I pretty much had it partially ready for checking if given string is a match or not."

^^Do you use like a dictionary api somewhere? Because im really courious how that is implemented.

Im not a big fan of chromatic abboration but the game looks great never the less.

Also i suck at it - never heard most words before (not native english though)

@willoxs Nah it's just a plain text file of words which I read into memory, a `Dictionary<string, string>` to be technical as that is the most performant way to check if a word exists in it (in C#). The word definitions are then queried from an API so you can check that if you're interested.

The sources for that are here:
https://github.com/anttihaavikko/unscrambler/blob/main/Assets/Scripts/WordDefiner.cs

Ah thx - didnt notice its open source:

"https://api.dictionaryapi.dev/api/v2/entries/en_US/" + word

for other readers who are as blind as i am

@willoxs Oh yeah of course, it's a requirement for compo entries.

great game, i like it a lot, is addictive lol, love the music, good work!

This is so polished! Really good UI work and a nice puzzler. The visual side was 5/5. Only thing I can think of that could have made it better is that the factory doesn't pop from the other "background art". Since I'm too lazy to read the descriptions unless I run into problems I didn't realize it was there at first. But I did finally notice it on my own.
Music and sfx were spot on as well!
Biggest problem with this game was that it didn't get challenging fast enough. I just bruteforced my way until I found a word and the time limit didn't really bother me.

:wave: Hi there! Just wanted to let you know that Unscrambler is featured on the GitHub Blog: [A peek inside some of the top games from Ludum Dare 49](https://github.blog/2021-10-25-a-peek-inside-some-of-the-top-games-from-ludum-dare-49/). Thanks for building this and for sharing the source code! :smiley:

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