I don't know why but I have to click on the right to click the letter I want but despite that I managed to beat one puzzle

@online-play Not sure why you had to do that either.

Thanks for playing though...

Love the unique take on the theme!

@moogs Thanks, I really wanted to write a puzzle game and wanted 'Out of Order' so I could do a rebus type concentration game. Doors would have been good too.

Thanks for taking the time

@beebster-games I think there may be a bug with how you are getting mouse location. Might have to do with different screen resolutions? If click on the puzzle nothing happens but if I click in the area to the left of the puzzle letters start changing color.

@moogs You could very well be correct. I am thinking that everyone one is using 1920 x 1080 resolution. If that is not the resolution you are using it might be throwing everything off.

I tried to make it as generic as possible but that might be a problem.

Thanks for playing and thanks for bringing it up

My mom *loves* word games (and I like them, too) so I turned this one over to her, then after a while my dad came and we ended up working on it together! Thanks for providing a nice game that was such a big hit here. For reference, we just finished puzzle 3 (I think?) after about 1 hr 15 minutes and will finish the others tomorrow.

Here's some feedback/desires they had:

1. A bar at the top that says the phrase that you have selected so far, whether or not it's right, so that you can see at a glance what you have--trying to keep the phrase in mind and follow it through the zigzags while looking for the next part was tough.

2. A way to see how long the phrase is--possibly an option to show it at the top, possibly in the form of another type of hint (like, Completion Hint: you're at 9 of 15 letters and 2 letters wrong), or like just providing a letter range for how long the phrase will be (like, 10-15 letters long).

3. Possibly an option to know if you've hit an end--like the square turns a different color or something.

4. Maybe tile color variation to reduce eye strain (like a palette of similar colors and possibly different background colors for different puzzles)

I think that was all it, but they scattered to the winds after telling me everything all at once, so I'll edit this post if I get more from them tomorrow.

Cheers for the good entry!

EDIT after beating:
I'm pretty sure we finished the game today, though I'll be honest, when the credits screen came up, I thought we were at eight puzzles, not ten, and I was worried I had hit the credits screen by mistake but couldn't figure out how to get back to the game or whether we'd beaten it.

Regardless, we all **liked the game a lot**, and I have a little bit more feedback to add.

First, as someone already said, I think there is a typo in one of the puzzles, though at my count I thought it was puzzle 6: there is a 'th' word instead of 'the' which may be how the phrase is usually said, but for this puzzle game was very confusing! Second, I want to say I really liked the way you did hints. I'm not sure how you programmed or selected them, but they were always very helpful, showing us where to look when we hadn't been considering that letter, or the correct choice when we were stuck between two possible and unlikely paths.

Finally a clarification on the first part in yesterday's feedback: If there would be a way to track the letters a player has selected and show them as regular text somewhere on the screen, to help us see the phrase we are building at a glance without needing to retrace through the zigzag and sometimes backwards text. My mom kept instinctively looking for this and requesting it, so I thought it important to pass on to you, though I can imagine there are several challenges like how to make the text read the right way around and have the correct spaces, even if it's not the correct phrase.

Thanks so much for being quick to our feedback into action, and once again for making this game for the jam in the first place!

@oter You have no idea how happy your comment made me. I am off the wall here. No matter what happens with the rest of this jam you have made this jam for me. Thank you, and your parents.

I will try and incorporate as much of your suggestions in as I possibly can. I like them all very much. I wasn't really clear on number one but the second one as a hint would be very doable. I will try and get that in before the deadline.

The colors are little tougher trying to get this done in three days.

The puzzles are pretty darn hard. I wrote the game, know the phrases, and still have a hard time.

Thanks again for playing. It means a lot to me. I'm 72 years old and have been a coder for over forty years. When someone appreciates the work it is wonderful.

@oter I put in the change for the hint. After you use the third hint on the top of the screen you will see text the says "YOU HAVE 'x' OUT OF 'x' CORRECT PHRASE IS 'x' LETTERS"

My wife said it was a good idea and she was impressed you got 3. The game is hard.

Hmm... an ambiguous approach to exploring the theme... I like it :) Good luck!

So after some trial and error I was able to click to the side and eventually solve some of these puzzles. The wife played with me and has a real knack for word puzzles. We managed to make it through 4 of them. Just a heads up There's a typo in the answer for the 4th puzzle which adds an extra bit of difficulty. Overall though we really enjoyed this game. This was a lot of fun. The music is also really well done. Despite sitting with the game for quite a while I wasn't tired of the music loop.

A nice little wordsearch-esque puzzle! It's a bit difficult without hints, but with the inclusion of the hints, they're generally not too bad to find. The info at the top with the letter counts was super helpful, too.

Nicely done!

@2009yasha2009 Thank you for the good wishes. Thank you for playing the game

@jimmothysanchez Thank you so much for finding the typo. The game is tough enough without a typo in it. Thank you for playing the game. The music is done by Alexander Nakarada and he is a genius. He has many other compositions at https://soundcloud.com/creatorchords/neverland-no-copyright-cinematic-fantasy-music?si=d386b2c1c1194f4d8395a1bb1f9d6f62&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing.

Thanks for playing, it does a developers heart good.

@breadstick Thank you so much, so very happy you played. The hint at the top was suggested by another player so I put it in just before the deadline.

Thanks again for playing.

This was great exercise for my brain! It took a second to acclimate to the ambiguity at first, but that's where the fun lies. I really didn't want to have to use hints (my own stubbornness), but I was glad they were there. :)

it doesnt work well with 2560x1440 resolution, when i click on a letter, it clicks half screen away

@machetemami Thanks for playing, glad you enjoyed your play.

@myezko Yeah, I had others say the same. I didn't have time to make it generic. I will fix that when I update the software to allow players to make their own phrase lists.

What a great idea.
Thank you for being honest about what the I.A. did and what you did yourself.

@grizembrrr Heck yeah. The hardest part about using the AI Grok and ChatGPT is getting the wording right for the request. But once you have a style that you like you can tell them to save the style and then you can recall to make the same type of stuff at a later date.

I almost made a game where ships go back and forth on the water surface and drop depth charges on submarines. ChatGPT generated all of those. The background, seaweed, fish, submarines, boats, depth charges the entire thing.

The thing is I am a programmer. Was a systems coder for over 40 years. Graphics, sound, music I am not good at so AI helps me. The music in the game though was made by a genius Alexander Nakarada. Look him up on SoundCloud he has tons of excellent music.

Good job!

I couldn't press the letters properly, my click not being made in the right place. But I liked the concept even if I didn't succeed XD

Oh, comeon you should fix the bug with the mouse tracking and resolution! (Then write to me;)) It is permitted by the rules, check it out. I didn't see the phrase and bottom half of letters.

I have 2k resoultion, so had the same problem with click positions as others.

As for game idea, original, but may be a bit too hard and/or dry as it is. I'd add a question/tip to what the phrase is. Like this:


And start with smaller boards, going up.

@fantasia-imagine Thanks for playing the game. I will be working on the resolution problem and I can hopefully work it out.

@oddmes Hopefully the work I am doing on the resolution stuff will pan out fairly soon. Thanks for playing the game.

@baturinsky I really like your idea about the hints. I just might add that in. Sorry about the resolution problem, hopefully I can get that worked out fairly quickly. Thanks for the suggestions and playing the game

So, for everyone who played the game I tried a quick resolution fix hack. I hope it works. The DL link is here, and on itch.io

There's some good ideas in terms of the word finding aspects.
Personally I found it quite hard to know where to start. Maybe if the first and last letter of each phrase was given to you off of the bat? And hints could give you a random letter somewhere in the middle between them to give you an idea of where to go.

Adding some sound effects would also be nice for clicking the buttons and hints and all of that jazz.

The music was nice.
I like word games so I was engaged for the time I spent on the first three puzzles!

@keely-brown Thanks for all the suggestions. I should have some clicking for every time a tile is pressed, or a button used. Its not that hard to do either. I even have a sound effect on my computer somewhere. The first and last letter area good idea too. I'll ask the wife and see what she says.

My wife told me that there are a lot of people out there who like word games like yourself. I was going to do some submarine game but she said to try this. It was fun!

Thanks again for playing

I'll be honest, I'm not very good at games like this and ended up using the hints immediately on each puzzle. I found the game to be pretty fun that way though, it was still a challenge to find the words. I agree with another commenter that a hint towards the sentence would have helped.

Very cool that this isn't made with a full game engine, I respect it!

@adamg It is pretty tough. I am going to add a letter to start the beginning of the phrase. That way there is the word 'DEPTH' in the phrase, and you have a starting point.

I am still thinking about the best way to add the hint for each phrase.

Still need to add the clicking.

Going to try and randomize the hints as to which letter it gets rather than the first one it finds

Finally, I am going to allow people to make their own lists of phrases for the game. I will take the list, randomize it and then they can play with their own list and maybe share it. The sticking point in this is to write the code that builds a puzzle procedurally. I tried once and I knew there wasn't going to be enough time to do it. I have time now and will release it as a version after the JAM.

In the future I would like to allow people to play together online. Have a little place where people can gather and play the game. I am familiar with sockets and TCP/IP and UDP protocols so I could do it. Would take a bit, but it would be fun to see if people enjoyed it.

Thanks again for playing, it is greatly appreciated.

This is a really nice game!

The hint system is really helpful. The game can be pretty difficult and this alleviates the whole problem, though I do feel that all points should be lost when using the "x of y correct" tool. I did use that tool liberally to get to the end after round 4.

Clever to have "depth" in each phrase. It makes it easy to find part of the phrase, while having warm-up phase to get started. I think that without it, the game would be 10x more difficult.

Good game, even if I'm not very good at it!

A difficulty progression could be a nice addition. For example, in the first level, the words in a phrase could only go vertically or horizontally, with no direction changes within a word, and only left to right or top to bottom. In the next level, words could go in any direction, and later on, introduce direction changes within words.

I always appreciate someone using SDL! I am really bad at these sorts of games, but it seemed to work well. The atmosphere and the music was nice. Good job!

@pincushion Thanks for playing brother. I'm glad you enjoyed the game!

@yiraa I really like the idea of graduating difficulties. I am writing a procedural generator for the puzzles and that would be a good addition.

@pres2300 I really enjoy programming. I have been one for almost fifty years. The fun in the jams for me is the programming. SDL3 is fast small, and just works. Thanks for playing the game brother, and thanks for the good words.

cool looking game check out my game https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/turbo-powered-cow-milker-3000

I am not very familiar with English, so this game is very difficult for me. After I read the rules and the first example, I was ready to start playing, but was quickly stumped. Then, after repeatedly turning the game on and off and using hints to cheat, I finally completed the first level. The whole process was very challenging, with interesting ideas.

This looks really fun but unfortunately even with the resolution fix I couldn't play it :( My screen is 1366x768 so the game doesn't fit. If you end up fixing this somehow do tell me because I love word games so I'd like to try this out!

@justuspan Thanks for keeping at the game and getting through the first phrase. Speaking a different language must be very challenging. What language do you speak?

@fupi Your resolution must have cut it off on the bottom an made it impossible to play. Couldn't see the buttons. I am going to see if I can figure a way to resize the screen and make is smaller so you can play.

Thank you both so much for playing my game. It means a lot to me.

I love word games, but it seems that my brain is not made for them. I found this really difficult but I definitely enjoyed it! I think this is one that I might come back to after I've finished rating some others and my brain is ready for a bit of a challenge...

@the-stewarts In the comments I have heard that a great deal. I am going to change the puzzles to be a bit more easily recognized. I have the words twisting in every direction, and the majority of the time the word is listed right to left, not left to right.

I am going to try and write a procedural generator to hopefully those who want to create their own lists.

Maybe finished by April 15, hopefully

Thank you for playing the game

Had a blast playing this game! Honestly, I've been playing LD games all day, so many platformers and idle games and tower defenses and quick time skill games... My head was so full and your word puzzle although pretty challenging, helped me relax a bit in the middle of all that! XD Here's my high score:


It's funny... Some of these phrases I could visualize very intuitively, while others were very very hard to find.

I liked the hints, they were very helpful. Also the simple design of turning blue when you click and turning green when you get it right was very nice. Oh, and the title screen is pretty cool!

My only few feedbacks would be:
- The colors are a bit harsh, I would suggest making the color palette a little softer on the eyes. In fact, this is a game with great potential to be juiced up quite a bit if you want to do that later. Background illustrations that match the phrases maybe? That would be cool
- The rules could be a bit more clear, concise and integrated into the gameplay... Maybe make a tutorial level? As it is, there's a lot of text in the rules, making it easy to miss important info. For instance, I almost missed the information that the phrase always contain the word DEPTH at first. Since this is the player's anchor to start finding the phrase, I feel like it should be the front and center. Also, I didn't see it explicitely said anywhere that the words could never be diagonally, so I was always thinking that was a possibility.

But these are just nitpicks and obviously things there is little time to think about during a jam! So anyway congrats and thank for a delightful puzzle game!

@borabee Wow, thanks for the great words, they are greatly appreciated. Your suggestions are just excellent and I am going to try an address them all.

There was another commentor who mentioned the colors being tough on the eyes, I am going to try and fix that, maybe make it adjustable somehow.

I didn't think about the diagonal direction until you mentioned it. I will put it in the rules.

I am going to move the rule that 'DEPTH' is in the phrase to the very top.

I really like the background hinting at the phrase, I will look into that.

I have also thought about a game like 'Concentration' where you match tiles that reveals an image which is a Rebus that depicts a phrase. I may do that later.

Thank you so much for taking the time to play the game and most of all for all of your suggestions.

By the way it was cool the way you posted your High Score

That's a pretty good puzzle game! I think trying out letters one by one should have some kind of limit. I think having DEPTH highlighted at start would make the game more easy to understand and give a starting point (since it's a good starting point in every level) Well made :clap:

@chuckiee Thanks for taking the time to play the game. Highlighting 'DEPTH' sounds like a pretty good idea I may see if I can do that.

Thanks again