WobblyWords by Dannyk1994

[raw]
made by Dannyk1994 for Ludum Dare 49 (JAM)

Welcome to the world of wobbly words.

The king of the kingdom is lost for words, help him get back on track!

* Random Game Crash on HTML 5 black screen, just refresh and try agian!*

Art, sound and music by kenny.itch.io.

Version 1.1 Bug Fixes - Fixed letters decaying in tutorial

  • Fixed bug where time limit went down much faster than expected.

  • Fixed bug where letters piled up randomly for no reason

  • Fixed bug where session score did not add up

TitleScreen.png

wobblyWordsSH3.png

Ratings

Overall 1163th 3.195⭐ 43🧑‍⚖️
Fun 1258th 2.915⭐ 43🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 438th 3.6⭐ 42🧑‍⚖️
Theme 777th 3.512⭐ 43🧑‍⚖️
Humor 1007th 2.514⭐ 37🧑‍⚖️
Mood 1153th 3⭐ 40🧑‍⚖️
Given 38🗳️ 57🗨️

Feedback

IcedJaM
04. Oct 2021 · 22:14 UTC
A clever use of the theme. The music is really nice and welcoming. I like this game.
kalevrk
04. Oct 2021 · 22:19 UTC
Really cool concept! I like the decaying of the letters and them eventually dropping out of the letter slots, but I found that they were dropping out of the slots pretty quickly, which made it very challenging, and sometimes the letters would get stuck in one part of the level and overlap and become un-clickable.
🎤 Dannyk1994
04. Oct 2021 · 22:21 UTC
@kalevrk Thanks for the feedback! Ya I over balanced it a little, it went from staying too long to not staying long enough, game is a bit of a buggy mess tbh haha
@icedjam Thanks for the feedback! Appreciate it!
curleyrach
04. Oct 2021 · 22:26 UTC
Interesting take on the theme. Music and sound work well.
OctahedronSoftware
05. Oct 2021 · 11:11 UTC
Nice idea for a game and I like the presentation. However, sometimes you get really difficult letters and all you can do is wait. Other than that I like it.
voodinator
05. Oct 2021 · 11:15 UTC
Interesting game and fun to play. Graphics and music are great. I find it quite challenging though because the time to find a word is very fast imo. Maybe you could make it speed up with time / or levels? And is it always possible to build words or is it random how the letters spawn? I feel i sometime get weird letters. The Tutorial is also well made, nice you found the time for it. Maybe choose another font for the Tutorial Text because its quite hard to read.
Kr0luK
05. Oct 2021 · 11:28 UTC
So interesting approach, but as for me the during of game are to small(or I do somthing wrong)
Sirkovitch
05. Oct 2021 · 11:30 UTC
Really hard game but I like the original concept !
Guilloteam
05. Oct 2021 · 11:37 UTC
A really nice way to use the theme! The presentation is nice, but I got stuck really fast with only consones (but I may just be bad at the game, English isn't my first language!)
(Also one time the screen turned black and I have to refresh the page; but it only happened once so it's not a big deal)
Overhall a really nice game, well done!
🎤 Dannyk1994
05. Oct 2021 · 11:49 UTC
@guilloteam Thanks for the feedback! I had considered that in the design, accessibility was always going to be an issue with this game. Going to add some features to help with that
LDJam user 269161
05. Oct 2021 · 13:29 UTC
Wobbling Words showed how many short words there are in english! maybe integrate some hints, as you saw it can be quite difficult for a non native english speaker.
ToSMaster
05. Oct 2021 · 15:47 UTC
A fun little game. There are a lot of possibilites. I like the idea of decaying words that put me on a clock. But I feel like i am too slow and keep dropping my words :D
Sometimes the boxes overlap and i cannot grab any of them
🎤 Dannyk1994
05. Oct 2021 · 18:50 UTC
Fantastic game, audio design is hilarious. Weapon combo is great addition. Had fun :)
Vimlark
06. Oct 2021 · 00:36 UTC
Nice work! there were a few issues but I could see this being fun with more to it.
LunacyEcho
06. Oct 2021 · 05:50 UTC
Ooh, so glad to see a word game in the mix! Love these. It's really interesting conceptually, since games that involve fast anagrams of words often don't *also* involve the dexterity required to drag them quickly to precise locations--as word games go, that made this one stick out for me.

A quick thought and a quick suggestion here. There were some moments where I would click and drag a tile to the empty boxes and let go, but then the letter tile would still follow my cursor until I clicked it again. I suppose it's possible this might be because the game supports both click-dragging and clicking once, moving the mouse, then clicking again? It was just a small thing that caused a few moments of frustration given the short amount of time there was for each tile.

The suggestion: it would be cool if you could support longer words! I would love a four- or five-letter mode with adjustments made to the amount of time before a tile falls out of the box. (Er, if this already exists and I didn't get to it, sorry!)

Cool game overall, though! I have a huge soft spot for word games, and the fun, bouncy mood plus the novel mechanic made this a fun play.

(also, was it just me or was the game kinda big in the browser screen lol)
Ashley GB
06. Oct 2021 · 07:46 UTC
This was a neat little game with a different approach to the theme. Only issue was that the letters would sometimes get dragged away with mouse even after placing them into a box, but otherwise nice job!
Not_AS_Artistic
06. Oct 2021 · 07:56 UTC
Nice game! My first impression was "it's scrabble with tetris"
Then it became more of "oh no no no why is this not a word"
I have a few issues with the gameplay, and it feels a little too unforgiving.
The boxes fall out a little too early, there are way too many vowels spawning.
I still like the concept, and I can definitely see this going someplace. Great job!
shores
06. Oct 2021 · 08:57 UTC
Fun concept! I wish you could make longer words. Unfortunately, at one point the screen went black while the music kept playing. I enjoyed playing it, good job!
🎤 Dannyk1994
06. Oct 2021 · 10:12 UTC
@lunacyecho Thanks some much for the feedback, some of the mechanics like the way you placed tiles was more out of necessity to fix a bug I could not solve. I am glad you enjoyed it, 4 and 5 letters words were on the agenda but the issue with searching through a list of all 5 letter words was something I couldn't optimize without a severe lag spike. I'm really glad you liked the mood because I spend a bit of time messing with different sounds and songs to get it right :)
🎤 Dannyk1994
06. Oct 2021 · 10:12 UTC
@ashley-gb @not-as-artistic @shores Thanks so much for the feedback :)
Scott Cooper
06. Oct 2021 · 15:24 UTC
Great use of the theme, liked your art style. Solid game!
R3dleg
06. Oct 2021 · 15:48 UTC
Sick entry. The Tutorial dude was super cute and i think it`a nice addition to the game and your tweening in the menu is on point. The speed of the game is quiet hard though. You don`t get words all the time. Overall well done :)
POBIX
06. Oct 2021 · 15:50 UTC
Fun game! I liked the idea, and I think that after some tweaking this game could be really good. Currently, most of the letters spawning are vowels and useless letters (x, z, etc.), and letters fall out too quickly.
Also, the font in the tutorial was way too small and quite hard to read.
pvp
06. Oct 2021 · 19:20 UTC
It was difficult for me since i'm not a native english speaker :p. The tutorial was nicely done. nice job.
zimny11
06. Oct 2021 · 21:35 UTC
First of all. That's a 5 stars for soundtrack for me. It is so catchy. Cool idea. Nice, clean art style.

It is quite hard for me as not native English speaker, but I had fun nevertheless.
🎤 Dannyk1994
07. Oct 2021 · 17:16 UTC
@zimny11 Thank for the feedback! Have already implemented a feature for my post jam version for that! Accessibility is always an issue with games like this, going to experiment with adding different languages too
yodoG
08. Oct 2021 · 04:53 UTC
I was very very happy to see a word game in here! I think there's a ton of potential here. Especially for powerups, multipliers, etc. I found myself waiting a lot hoping for the right letters to fall but ended up with a bunch of Qs, Ys, and Zs. There definitely needs to be a bit of balancing here, but I love the feel and mood of the game.
fiaKaiera
08. Oct 2021 · 17:40 UTC
I don't think I want to echo what others have said at this point.

But if you want to make this game a lot friendlier, then you should balance the distribution of letters around there, especially the consonants and the amount of letters that appear on the screen.

For example, there's definitely a moment where I ended up with 8 boxes of consonants with no vowels, so I never even have any chance to make a word. You should also weight more on letters that are more common. A quick google search would definitely help with that. Like, T, N, L, S, and C being the most common, having the best chance to appear and the vowels just appear in a random order.

I also actually ran out of time with the golden letter animation taking too long.

Other than that, it could be fun, it's just more infuriating at this state. Good work!
JaviCoder
09. Oct 2021 · 22:19 UTC
hahaha so much fun, it's quite challenging.
solid entry, good job
ColeSlaughter
11. Oct 2021 · 00:25 UTC
[Thanks for submitting your game to stream!](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1172137556?t=03h11m22s)

I'm still upset that it didn't recognize POO as a valid word... :angry:

Still a very clever and fun game to play around with though! Nice job!
🎤 Dannyk1994
11. Oct 2021 · 19:18 UTC
@coleslaughter That word will forever be excluded from future patches. Really enjoyed watching you stream and thanks for playing !
JoeShanahan
12. Oct 2021 · 20:11 UTC
I found myself quite confused by this game. One time I played and there were no vowels, so I couldn't do anything. And the next time it was *only* vowels so I also couldn't do anything. Also sometimes just a bunch of letters would spawn in faster than I could possibly use them and I lost.

I think this idea has a bunch of potential, but it needs to be made much clearer what the rules are, why the letters are/aren't appearing. Occasionally something would appear on screen like "black hole" but I wasn't sure if that was something I did, or was random, or if it was a button I was supposed to press? I didn't seem to see a black hole appear on screen so it confused me a great deal.

I tried to follow the tutorial and it just got stuck on the second step. I tried CAB, ABC, BAC, and none of them changed anything. I had to force close the game to get out. Maybe the tutorial will have explained more if I could've got it to work?

So overall, interesting concept, needs a bit more work though!
🎤 Dannyk1994
13. Oct 2021 · 16:02 UTC
@joeshanahan Thanks for the feedback, there are certainly too many mechanics going on, letter generation has been fixed now. Thanks for playing, appreciate the feedback :)
JoeShanahan
16. Oct 2021 · 20:24 UTC
I put my playthrough of this up on YouTube, you can check it out here :smile:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_c61TA_VfM
PossiblyAxolotl
21. Oct 2021 · 02:15 UTC
Love the idea a lot and the gameplay works fairly well, still has some issues but that's expected for a weekend long jam