Deliver letters... IN SPACE by Phoenix Fireflower
You've taken a job as a delivery person in space, transporting letters to floating mailboxes. However, you soon find out that by 'letters' they mean letters of the English alphabet, not writings.
Send letters to the floating mailboxes with the left mouse button. The mailboxes themselves also have letters on them. If the letters on the mailboxes form a word, they will disappear and you'll earn points. You may also destroy an entire row of mailboxes with the right mouse button if they contain unfavorable letters (don't worry, the insurance company will cover for it). After destroying a row, your spaceship blaster needs to recharge, so only use it if it's really needed.
Also, the mailboxes will slowly move towards you due to gravitational influence. If they draw too close to your spaceship, it's game over, so try to be quick. The best five scoring players will show up on the leaderboard.
Note: this game may not work properly on Safari browsers or when using a keyboard other than QWERTY!
Lastly, some gameplay tips:
- Initialisms and most abbreviations do not count, as are words that are made up entirely of consonants.
- When a '?' appear you may decide for yourself what letter you will send. This can be any letter on your keyboard.
Ratings
| Overall | 136th | 3.721⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 148th | 3.583⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 49th | 3.955⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 366th | 3⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 247th | 3.398⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 87th | 3.705⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 31🗳️ | 76🗨️ |
But fun and great job on completing every aspect, from instructions to fitting sfx!
I thought the game was really fun and chill until I realized it said "press enter to start" at the bottom ^_^. That was pretty fun, and feels original! I would have liked just a little bit of a breather so it wasn't so intense for so long.
The music is quite nice :)
Great job on the ux as well. I really like the letter previews, when you are aiming somewhere.
Trying to find words is way easier with this feature, but the game remains difficult
It's kind of sad that my best attempt was spamming vowels to replace all consonants and pressing t whenever the "?" appeared :sweat_smile:
It was fun to discover that the letter selection appears to be influenced by the letters in the current line.
When you have only vowels left, you always get a consonant.
This seems like such an unnecessary feature, but it's impact on the balancing and feel of the game is incredible.
The UI seems a bit confusing wen aiming, at first i thought that the letter would be swapped when I shot. Maybe the next letter could be next to the player instead of isolated at the side. Great entry!
Nice entry.
I have only one small suggestion : the UI display the letter to shoot directly in the mailbox above, which is nice, but in my opinion the letter that is currently in the mailbox is shrink a bit too much and makes it harder to process which letters are currently in the mailboxes and where is the best place to send the next letter.
But that's a minor thing. Overall that's a really solid entry ! Congrats !
One thing I found difficult is it seems like there are some words I would expect to be in the dictionary that just aren't there. Two examples I can recall: 'lop' and 'cay.' Also I feel like 'ax' seems like a real word, but maybe I'm wrong there. (Is it written somewhere that two letter words are excluded? I feel like that would be a reasonable rule, but as far as I can tell it isn't mentioned anywhere).
I think that my "high score" run was largely luck. Sometimes I had no idea of any words that could possibly work, and I was just spamming the shoot button, and happened to get a word that worked. Once I completely by accident formed a 5 letter word right on the brink of death.
This is interesting, because I'm not actually sure what kind of strategy will beat random spam. Sure, I do think that some well-chosen right clicks did bring my score higher, but at the end of the day I would not have nearly as high a score had I actually tried to rationally build every single word.
I think this is to some degree a good thing. It's interesting that the game has more strategic depth than just being really good at coming up with words quickly. Moreover, random spam is sometimes a strategy that requires some thinking -- in particular, I would often have a specific word in mind, like "cup" or "pat" or whatever, and just be shooting between those two consonants as fast as possible because I know it will eventually work.
Interestingly, I think the missing dictionary words were much more punishing when I actually had a specific letter and came up with a rational placement for it by looking for one in the words. That is, both the examples I gave, "lop" and "cay," have similar words with a different vowel in the middle, so the random letter spam strategy will work for them even though it won't work due to that particular word. But when I just have the single letter "o" or "a" and I am trying to come up with a quick way to form a 3 letter word, and forming "lop" simply doesn't work, unexpectedly, it's actually pretty punishing for that strategy.
So I think that expanding the dictionary a bit could be a good idea. It is definitely hard to find a good balance between including the words that people will happen to expect to be in there, and including words that are so rarely used that they don't really seem like fair words to include. The problem is the dividing line is different for everyone. In particular, I personally am extremely surprised that "lop" is not in the dictionary. It seems like a pretty normal word in my mind.
Anyways, I did have a good time with the game. The game design is pretty good, I think, very engaging, and there are a few different strategies that work at least reasonably well. I also found the difficulty to be a nice change of pace. It was difficult but it wasn't annoying or really very frustrating. I think the graphic design is pretty clean, and the music is great as well. Great job!