This was a blast. A great concept that took some real thinking to get through some of the battles. Unfortunately the skeleton king did me in. I did not expect what he did when I got him to low health...

Well done!

Wow, I'm honestly blown away :) This is an awesome game! Battles are engaging and tactical and the mechanic is really fun and innovative. Defeated the last boss first try, although I did take a peek at a dictionary ^_^'

Thanks for the game!

The core mechanic takes a moment, but then it's actually really neat. I wish there was a bit more control over the actual unit selection as opposed to "find longest word w/ max combo", but it's fun! That map pan was *chefs kiss* XD

Very fun and unique game. I quite liked how the final boss runs out of steam for a little about halfway, giving you time to recuperate and possibly burst it down. There's also huge potential for expansion (do I smell a roguelike brewing? :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:)

Interesting mechanic! Good atmosphere! I like it!

STEADY

Like the art style. But stuck at the first level, how to spell word with "ZXSYBR"?

@klose Sorry for the lack of clarity - letters that aren't assigned to heroes can still be used, it'll just conscript some not-so-strong peasants instead.

If you try typing out the letters that aren't in the bottom tray they'll pop up and contribute (in their own small way) to the cause.

This game is very fun - I enjoyed the unique gameplay.

DANG, this was cool! Definitely a brain tickler, but it was super fun and well presented. The art was great, difficulty curve felt fair, everything really just felt right with this one. Really really well done.

The only thing I found was that initially, before I realized I could use letters that weren't given, I got a bit frustrated because I struggled finding words without many vowels given to me. Maybe a bit more communication about that? I also found that letters like Z and V were just so hard to use anywhere, maybe you could experiment with giving different letters different likelihoods of spawning. (That could be an interesting avenue to explore when thinking about difficulty settings, too)

Congrats on this thing! It was a special one

very pretty drawings! and the gameplay was pretty fun! i keep losing to the castle of doom

@secretjuice Thanks for playing and for the great feedback! I was throwing together the initial "tutorial hints" at the last minute and I totally missed mentioning that any letters were valid (and also that peasants can't trigger the "leading letter" bonus, but that's a secondary concern). I would definitely be a good improvement to give that extra clarification at the start.

On the topic of difficult-to-use letters, a concept I had at the start during the design phase was related to it: I was thinking that heroes that go unused for several rounds will eventually "level up" (either by a certain round count, incrementing random chance, something like that). That way letters that are harder to use naturally get more valuable, and leaving a bank of characters alone for a while could be a good strategy to make them even stronger (though common letters are still likely to get used).

It didn't make it into this version of the game because I wasn't confident that we could:
1. communicate the concept clearly - I was already struggling to get any kind of tutorial done for the basics
2. display "levelled up" letters in a readable way (maybe silver / gold tiles or letters would help show it?)
3. make it easy to tell how much better upgraded heroes are. Simple rules like 2x or 3x power might be okay, but it makes mental math harder and balance trickier too.

But I think there are versions of that idea that could work - maybe letters can gain elements that will power-up the word they're used in, or enemies can apply ailments that make some letters poisonous. Lots of potential for ways to give interesting incentives that push players toward rarer letters, in addition to tweaking the randomness of the whole thing.

Really satisfying take on the "typing combat" style of gameplay!

Great work!

We need vowels. Great idea, I experienced what it's like to recite an incantation for a summoned battle. The controls are simple and the visual feedback is appropriate. Nice work!

This game is truly unique, I love the way it writes any word and it fits perfectly. Although it's true that without the screenshots I wouldn't have understood it because I'm a bit clumsy hehe.

Nice! The mechanic kept me playing right until the end. At first I felt like there needed to be more vowels, but then I realised I could just write any word. Perhaps that should have been made clearer like with a tutorial if there was more time. All in all I really liked it! Art was great too.

Woah that's an interesting idea, I could really see this type of game using a daily challenge mechanic like you have in some words games nowadays. Awesome job guys !

What a lovely entry! I lost to the dragon, =( it was an intense battle. It was surprisingly interesting (I'm not a scrabble/wordle player myself).
The sound and music was good. I learned a melody by heart while playing.

The only problem I experienced was a screen size on itch.io. The game started in the left top part of the screen and was tiny.

And hear me out, "UWU" should be a valid word.

A bag of scrabble pieces, or a bag of holding? Love the combination of classic questing with puzzling wordplay. The art and audio were pretty sweet, too. I especially liked the little side profiles of the partymembers going into combat (looked almost like classic mortal combat characters).

Your idea is so cool and I was so surprise when I first tried it (in a good way). In fact it helps me work my english ahah. Maybe I would remove the authorization to use the same word several times (I used "Apple" a lot. Congrat on creating this gameplay mixing fight and scrabble !

Your idea is so cool and I was so surprise when I first tried it (in a good way). In fact it helps me work my english ahah. Maybe I would remove the authorization to use the same word several times (I used "Apple" a lot. Congrat on creating this gameplay mixing fight and scrabble !

Oh and I forgot to say that I had problem with the screen (It's possible to play anyway but maybe you'd like to know.

@st00nsa @deborah-messaoudene
Thank you for your feedback, and sorry for the issue with the screen ending up too small. I think I've identified the underlying issue - the options we set for resizing didn't play nice with high-dpi displays and would make the gameplay window much smaller space allotted by itch.io

I've figured out a basic fix (I think) and done a bit of local testing. If all goes well I'll get a resizable version published later today!

@deborah-messaoudene
About the "reusing words" problem: I did have some worries that folks might get stuck on a couple of words and keep reusing them, but I didn't prevent it (in this version of the design / game) for a couple of reasons:
1. Making the player remember the words they've already used could become more annoying than fun. The simplest version of the rule (you can't use the same word you used last turn) isn't too much to keep track of, but we'd still need to find some screen space in the UI to remind the player of their last-used word. It's some extra complexity, which I thought we might not need because...
2. When you use a word, all of that word's letters are gone from the list of "heroes" at the bottom of the screen. Reusing the same word probably won't have the same effect; we get some heroes back each turn (and the number increases in the later battles) but the type of hero each letter is assigned to changes. This turn "apple" would give you 10 attack and 8 block, but next turn it might give 4 healing and 2 block. Add in the way enemies change their action each turn, and there are lots of reasons to try to find a new "best" word.

All of that said, I know it can be tricky to make my brain move on from some word that I've used before, so maybe it is a good idea to have some more-direct reason to discourage word reuse. It's more fun to keep coming up with new words, I think, so maybe a more direct restriction is the right way to help it happen.

I enjoyed playing this game. A unique idea, at least for this moment, haven't seen something like this game. Good job)

Awesome game! I played after watching on stream yesterday and had a blast, I managed to beat everything and finish off with full HP! I was really concerned about the castle, but then it... wasn't that bad? It had one move that only added one block, I was certain it must be charging something and I'd get obliterated next move, but nope, barely a scratch! I still loved this game and was really hoping to find an endless mode at the end! :heart:

@justcamh Thanks for playing, it's really fun to hear about your experience!

The castle's behavior there can definitely be a little odd. If you'd like a peek behind the design curtain, I'm happy to oblige!

...Unfortunately, I ended up rambling way too long (even for me!) If you have an interest in poking around a design retrospective of the different enemies, I've got you covered: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W1pfCjqPfKfHuDi3OzNYUxJPhdcFaTMhtoeP0ad6-o0/edit?usp=sharing

But it *is* a bit much, definitely no pressure to read it.

Anyway, thanks for enjoying the game!

Nice design retrospective! My experience with the castle was that it did the 1 block, and I was sure it was charging something. It did 10 damage, not scary at all. Then 25 and it seemed like the damage would keep scaling up from there. But then it did 25 again. So from your design doc, I’d guess 25 dmg was its big attack, but really 25 damage didn’t phase me at all, largely because attacking will always block as well. So generally without trying, a big attack would also protect against 15ish damage.

I found the most scary enemy to be the dragon, whom deals unblockable damage, putting a very real timer onto the combat, where if I don’t kill it quickly, I’d end up dead. I had hoped the castle was doing something similar, where if I didn’t kill it fast enough, it would be guaranteed to kill me eventually. So it could do 10, then 25, 35, 40, 50, and keep scaling up damage to send you into a panic.

Though to be fair all of this is coming from someone who already knew all the strategies from having watched it be played on stream. So I already knew to finish off the skeleton guy before he healed and had saved up heaps of damage. I was also going all in on the ‘double the effect of the first hero’, which is a mechanic I probably wouldn’t have understood on my own, but allowed me to do some truly devastating attacks. I would’ve just loved to see more enemies to challenge me further as I really enjoyed the mechanics of it!

Since conscription sucks, I came back and beat the game without any peasants! This was actually a really fun challenge, I always had to wait a turn at the start to be able to get good letters going. And vowels were in low supply, so I had to get some creative words going. The dragon and skeleton king were both pretty challenging, though the castle was a pushover, killed it entirely with magic damage, the walls never fell!



Quixote was a word, Pheonix wasn't though 😔
Skele king was the hardest I think because of his full heal
Good concept, kept coming back til I finished.

This was a phenomenal entry! It was missing a few words I expected but that wasn't too big of a deal. It took me a bit to realize that I could use letters that weren't on the cards as well to get peasants. Otherwise this was a fun game that I think you could take further and word-game lovers would really enjoy! Keep on making games :smiley:


Hey this is really fantastic! I love the overall vibes, it's like a chill typing game lol. Though it became quite challenging! I lost at what I assume was quite close to the end, unfortunately.