This will be a solo effort and my first time participating in a game jam. I have developed several prototype games for class projects and some slightly more finished educational game products for clients, but this’ll be a bit of a “get the gears turning and scrape the rust off” effort. Looking forward to the theme and joining in the frenzy!

It took several hours to come up with an idea, but eventually I got interested in a kind of roguelike word game. Similar to games like SCRABBLE, you place tiles horizontally or vertically, and each letter tile is worth some number of points. The board itself is where the game takes a turn. Every tile you place "reveals" that tile and it's neighbors, so you can see if there are bonuses, items, or the "way out" of the level. When the clock reaches zero or you run out of tiles, it's game over. Race against the clock, earn as many points as you can, and discover "spells" along the way!

So far, the tile placement and validation mechanics are in place. I'm using a 300k+ wordlist which streams pretty quickly on startup, so the tedious parts are done. I might actually get a few hours to do ALL OF THE THINGS that need to be done though, because it's pretty rough right now... no sounds, no music, the UI is awful, and so on.

The game itself is still pretty rough. I have a map editor now, but there's still a lot to do. While the game is playable, the question is... submit for the Compo (which was the goal), or get a few extra hours and submit to the Jam?

Letterout is a roguelike word game, similar to Scrabble.

I was going to submit for the Compo, but as you can see from the link below, the game needs a lot of work to make it playable. It's somewhat functional now though. If you play this (really rough) version, let me know if you make it to the "45"!

http://gameforming.com/games/LD45/index.html

Letterout is a game kinda like Scrabble where you use letter tiles to form words and score points. The twist here is that you need to reach the exit on each map in order to progress. If you can make to an exit in the 10th level, you win the game! Score as many points as you can along with way, but don't be too distracted by those bonus tiles!

Submission Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/letterout

This was an intense 72 hours. It'll take a lot longer to untangle the technical debt in this project, but I still had a lot of fun participating! I've been seeing so many awesome posts from you all, and I hope I can play every one of your submissions. Cheers!