YOGO Letter! by hbocao

[raw]
made by hbocao for LD28 (JAM)
Hey guys,

It's my second Ludum Dare, however, in this one I got a partner. It was his first time, and as he didn't want to participate alone and I wouldn't have enough time to make it to the compo, it worked out really well!
Even though we are not very proud of our idea, making it to the end has made us both really satisfied.

We hope you have a really fun time playing our minimalist game.

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YOGO Letter! is a game where you are challenged to dive into the depths of your mind and try to discover the correct word in the given time! And oh, You Only Get One LETTER!

The game is fairly simple. We give you one letter and you must guess the secret word in the meantime. Once you get the right one you earn a bonus time, and move up a level.

You can guess an infinite number of words, and at every attempt we give you two hints: the number of letters that you hit right in the place (bluish square) and the number of letters that you missed the correct positioning (grayish square).

For these letters you earn time bonuses. Also, you can buy an usage example, the word definition and a bonus letter of the secret word, but it will cost you 75%, 50% and 25% of your time respectively.
The game ends when you run out of time. Good guesses!

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Made with Visual Studio 2012, C# (Framework 4.5), WPF, Extended WPF Toolkit, MySQL Connector, the "words dictionary" API from www.wordnik.com, and piano hints from www.VirtualPiano.net.

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Filipe Scur - filipe.scur@gmail.com
Henrique de Aguiar - @hbocao

Ratings

Coolness 37% 1329
Overall(Jam) 2.50 467
Fun(Jam) 2.44 422
Innovation(Jam) 2.87 259
Theme(Jam) 3.13 160

Feedback

incobalt
17. Dec 2013 路 00:19 UTC
I ended up with some very strange words, like cwms and erer. On the plus side, it taught me what a cwm was, but I still don't know what an erer is supposed to be.
epb9000
18. Dec 2013 路 04:37 UTC
My vocabulary knowledge and recall is truly horrific apparently, but good show.
ReactorScram
19. Dec 2013 路 01:01 UTC
Was not able to run it. "Not a valid Win32 application". I guess it needs the C# runtime?
AnnaGavaldaKedavra
19. Dec 2013 路 01:11 UTC
Quite hard, the list of words on the right isn't really "user-friendly" :). I'm french so i really can't find some words.
馃帳 hbocao
19. Dec 2013 路 01:33 UTC
@ReactorScram Yeah, probably you need to install Framework .net 4.5. Sorry :(
javifugitivo
19. Dec 2013 路 01:34 UTC
Great idea.
Lissar
19. Dec 2013 路 01:35 UTC
I wanted to enjoy this game, but the first word I got was "buss"! Apparently this is an archaic word. Which, while fascinating! is a bit frustrating in this kind of game.
馃帳 hbocao
19. Dec 2013 路 01:39 UTC
@AnnaGavaldaKedavra @incobalt @epb9000 Yeah, the game is kinda hard and English only. Sorry about that. All words have a definition where the API query it. The problem is that, sometimes, you get abbreviations.

@AnnaGavaldaKedavra What do you mean with "list no user-friendly"? Can you elaborate more, please? Thanks for the feedback. ;)
jomomomo
19. Dec 2013 路 03:20 UTC
Can't play windows games. :-(
馃帳 hbocao
22. Dec 2013 路 14:47 UTC
@Lissar Yeah, it's a random word and we did our best to use the API to make it more easier, but that's it

@jomomomo :( Sorry, man
tobbez
22. Dec 2013 路 15:31 UTC
Some of the words used are quite rare. It seems like if you use the example you can go on almost forever. After some words I got an example that did not include the word but that seems to be the only way to fail with that strategy. Like the idea but it put too high demands on the dictionary used and also many of the words picked I had not ver heard, more common words would be more fun.
bodsey
23. Dec 2013 路 11:09 UTC
Simple but effective. It's a bit hard for me as english isn't my mother tongue :) Ps : the game crashed when I tried to play again
Sanguine
23. Dec 2013 路 12:05 UTC
BOOM HIGHSCORE! Anyway, nice job on the game, really cool idea. It seems like the only viable option is to just keep using the example every time. (or at least for me)
GarethIW
26. Dec 2013 路 14:12 UTC
Agree with the above, had to buy the example every time. Interesting to see a word game in LD though!