Word Digger by MattV

[raw]
made by MattV for LD29 (COMPO)
Make words by dragging your mouse over them! Digging through a word reveals the next layer of letters. Only letters from the same layer can be combined. Collect powerups like rainbows, shades, missile-carrots, and more to help you out as you try to get the best score on the leaderboard!

Ratings

Coolness 96% 2
Overall 3.30 439
Audio 1.73 985
Fun 3.34 310
Graphics 3.09 611
Humor 1.96 892
Innovation 3.27 414
Mood 2.69 822
Theme 2.84 889

Feedback

Pent
28. Apr 2014 路 02:27 UTC
Can you try to bugfix the name entry? Chrome on OSX and it doesn't let me enter anything.
ryebread761
28. Apr 2014 路 02:28 UTC
Good game, quite hard.
ehtd
28. Apr 2014 路 02:29 UTC
I think I am bad with words... nice game!
馃帳 MattV
28. Apr 2014 路 02:31 UTC
@Pent - I'm not sure! It works for me in chrome OSX! I've noticed that unity web player sometimes won't take mouse input after you accept it to "run once", and you have to switch tabs and come back. Might that be the case here? Sorry! I'll try to see if I can figure anything else out.
zeh
28. Apr 2014 路 02:32 UTC
Great entry. Subtle but good use of the theme. I'm not a fan of the timer, but I see you have rankings so it makes it worth it.
jugglerrob
28. Apr 2014 路 02:32 UTC
I'm not very good at spelling games, but nice color scheme.
eskivor
28. Apr 2014 路 02:33 UTC
Funny game.
weazen
28. Apr 2014 路 03:02 UTC
Can't enter my name on OSX Chrome
馃帳 MattV
28. Apr 2014 路 03:07 UTC
@weazen oh no! I just went and tried on my macbook and it worked. Are you having trouble playing other entries that use the unity webplayer or just mine?
aneeslol
28. Apr 2014 路 03:07 UTC
I liked it quite a bit, but I'm curious as to what actually counts as a word? Seems like a few times I'd get stuck and just drag the mouse around and it would count random 2 letter combinations as words.
馃帳 MattV
28. Apr 2014 路 03:19 UTC
@aneeslol - the dictionary is supposedly the scrabble dictionary (unless there are bugs in my reading of it, which there were at the last minute and I hope I fixed).
Andrew Adams
28. Apr 2014 路 03:23 UTC
I had the name issue on chrome OSX as well. I refresh and it was fine. Anyway, great game. Lots of fun.
terraco
28. Apr 2014 路 04:28 UTC
Don't know what language the dictionary is in. Maybe the letters need to be tweaked to allow more words to be made
tiffi_gaming
28. Apr 2014 路 12:38 UTC
Good use of theme!
Doubstract
28. Apr 2014 路 15:41 UTC
I played it 30min, very good job!
Highscore: 318!(I am 4th right now :))
馃帳 MattV
28. Apr 2014 路 17:35 UTC
@Doubstract - nice! Even beat my score!
stenol
28. Apr 2014 路 22:59 UTC
Great game. Miss some sfx but it's not important for that kind of game. Great work.
Zednaut
28. Apr 2014 路 23:06 UTC
A fun little puzzle game! A lot of stuff really stumped me, but I had a lot of fun digging for words. Interesting use of the theme, too! Never would have thought of it.
馃帳 MattV
28. Apr 2014 路 23:25 UTC
@stenol - oh man I know! I was gonna add sfx at the end and then I was just brain dead and hungry and instead some huge bugs came up. Definitely something to do different last time. I didn't even miss sound that much until I started playing other peoples games!
Balloonsfor600
29. Apr 2014 路 00:48 UTC
I like the concept but wow it is tough to clear that board. I had a few good rounds, but that dang Z just kept showing up!
Lars Faust
29. Apr 2014 路 12:53 UTC
It seems to come down to just connecting two random letters as fast as possible, as the game will often accept that.

However, the general idea is very good. Would like to see a more polished and probably a bit easier version for mobile. I think that could work really well.
馃帳 MattV
29. Apr 2014 路 16:11 UTC
@Lars - Yeah I think something is wrong with my dictionary code... I'm looking at the data and it seems like a lot of bogus two letter words are in there. I'll definitely have to dig into that more if I decide to keep working on this. Thanks for playing!
馃帳 MattV
29. Apr 2014 路 17:09 UTC
although, there are a surprisingly large number of bogus 2 letter words allowed in scrabble (the dictionary I am trying to use is a scrabble word list): http://www.scrabblefinder.com/two-letter-scrabble-words/ like come on AA is not a word!
Mekuri
29. Apr 2014 路 18:20 UTC
Nice game- I liked the layered part a lot, great idea! The game felt solid and well polished. I had fun, and it's always fun when people add leaderboards ;)
brodavi
29. Apr 2014 路 22:34 UTC
Nice! Captured my attention. I got a few words that I think aren't words. I can just drag around the game kinda cheating :P
brodavi
29. Apr 2014 路 22:35 UTC
Nice! Captured my attention. I got a few words that I think aren't words. I can just drag around the game kinda cheating :P I didn't get any powerups though :(
馃帳 MattV
29. Apr 2014 路 23:10 UTC
@brodavi thanks for playing! on the first day it punished players for submitting bad words, but people were pretty annoyed by that. Maybe I should do the opposite and reward players who don't miss? Something to think about if I polish it more! Also yeah some of the words seem bogus (because scrabble accepts bogus words, and because I might have a bug in my word checker)
porglezomp
29. Apr 2014 路 23:55 UTC
It seems to accept lots of two-vowel or consontant-vowel words. It's really fun though, I liked the leaderboards, how did you make them?
Sparrow
30. Apr 2014 路 00:10 UTC
Woooooo! 302! I'm bad at these games but i'm in the highscore thanks to the two word exploit and sometimes seeing words.
Cool game, you should definately put this on mobile.
馃帳 MattV
30. Apr 2014 路 00:34 UTC
@porglezomp I used dreamlo for the leaderboards: http://dreamlo.com/ I'm not sure how it would scale to production but it's SICKENINGLY easy for a prototype. This is the file in my project that does all the score posting, parsing, and display and it's like ~50 lines: https://github.com/MCSDWVL/worddigger/blob/master/Assets/Scripts/ScoreBoard.cs
馃帳 MattV
30. Apr 2014 路 00:34 UTC
(um actually please don't look at that file since shows you how easy it would be to cheat... ha... haha... no one would do that right?!)
馃帳 MattV
30. Apr 2014 路 00:35 UTC
@Sparrow & @porglezomp omg! There are probably bugs but also scrabble is just THE WORST about bullshit 2 letter words. QI IS NOT A WORD SCRABBLE. I DON'T CARE WHAT COUNTRY YOU SAY IT'S FROM.
Nic V.
30. Apr 2014 路 04:57 UTC
Enjoyed the gameplay. Would really love to play this on my phone!
vilya
01. May 2014 路 00:59 UTC
I like word games and this is a nice twist on the genre. I didn't have any idea what the power-ups would do though - in fact I kept forgetting I had them. Maybe a tutorial or something would help?
recursor
01. May 2014 路 18:05 UTC
I enjoyed this one quite a bit and have bookmarked it for later. Very nice job and a cool take on the theme.
馃帳 MattV
01. May 2014 路 18:26 UTC
@Nic V - It will happen! @vilya - you are totally right, the first time user experience definitely needs a LOT of work if I polish this up post compo. Forgetting you have powerups is also a major problem that I have to think hard about fixing. @recursor - awesome thanks for playing!
zkenshin
01. May 2014 路 19:03 UTC
Really interesting entry, neat idea. Well done. :)
Thorig
02. May 2014 路 11:10 UTC
Good game!
Lerc
04. May 2014 路 12:01 UTC
Best I could do was 717. Needs a different way of thinking to most word games.
Raiyumi
17. May 2014 路 05:30 UTC
This was a pretty fun game. Nice entry!