How many of the 100 anagrams can you solve?

What went right:

+ Reference simple rules in a popular game: Jennifer loves Scrabble, so she might like Text Twist, which apparently a lot of people on Yahoo games like. Honestly, I didn’t want to make a fighting game, so the theme “unconventional weapon” was bumming me out. I decided I could playtest an anagram game, because my girlfriend kills me at Scrabble and Banagrams. It worked: Saturday night, she played the prototype for over an hour!

+ Playtest 2 text files in the first 3 hours: Jennifer and Anders played a text file prototype of rhyming, which they didn’t like, and anagram typing tutorial, which they liked more, so I made that. I just showed them the text file and had them type into another text file. I really would prefer a rhyming game, but others wanted anagrams, which gives you flexibility of multiple solutions.

+ Research multiple-solution anagrams: A website had a lot of anagram words, so I could include 100 of those words. How many different anagrams of “ywas” can you type?

What went wrong:

– Little playtesting of harder words, so word 85 stumped more friends than word 86.

– Procrastinated playtesting graphics, so the images are minimal and clashing. I was planning for robots and missiles, but people tell me this looks like a dungeon crawler with a sword. Now that I listened to player’s interpretation, I could play that up more.

– Procrastinated playtesting sounds, so the sounds are incongruent. For this, I’m thinking next time I’d try musical notes in MuseScore rather than 8-bit sounds in BFXR.

Play Anagram Attack