Meaning by Sharks

[raw]
made by Sharks for Ludum Dare 57 (COMPO)

Meaning, a silly little word game!

Meaning is an incredibly short word game about digging into the true, deeper meaning of language. After struggling all weekend, I threw this together in three hours at the end...

I've been in a rut for the past three or so Ludum Dare's, so I didn't want yet another unfinished project going on the books - hence « Meaning » !

How to play?

Once you hit start, you will be given a word and have thirty seconds to type in as many synonyms for it you can possibly think of - in other words, you are digging into the deeper meaning of each word.

Don't be afraid to try two word or hyphenated synonym's - there are some of those in there!

A quick note: after the thirty seconds is up, you will automatically advance to the next word, however this is very little feedback for when this happens (sorry!) so you'll have to pay attention to know.

Note for mobile users: often times the « game area » doesn't resize correctly, so you may have to scroll to see the word and / or the timer!

Expected playing time

There are only five words total, and thirty seconds each, so expect to spend exactly two minutes and thirty seconds playing, if you decide to stay through to the end.

Thanks for checking this out!!

Thank you for checking out my little thrown-together project, even though it is really not fun at all ;)

Ratings

Given 2🗳️ 1🗨️

Feedback

LDJam user 280036
08. Apr 2025 · 02:25 UTC
I love word games. I did a few rounds scouring my brain for synonyms but there wasn't really any reward for getting one correct other than yet another word that I might not know any synonyms for :sweat_smile: I didn't know 'vitrolic' (was it supposed to be 'vitriolic'?) so I wished there was a skip function. Some of the words I typed didn't work when I expected them to, like 'demoralized' and 'disheartened' for 'discouraged'. I guess you could argue they're not true synonyms.

That said, it's impressive for a 3 hour job. I haven't played anything else like it yet. Well done.
LDJam user 287424
08. Apr 2025 · 02:48 UTC
Kind of a neat idea. I'm apparently really bad at synonyms cause I sucked at this game. :laughing:
kroltan
08. Apr 2025 · 16:02 UTC
It's lovely to even get something done in 3 hours, good job!

But I'm either really bad at this or the vocabulary was a bit limited / using a very strict definition of synonym, I only got 3 points :smile:
LDJam user 385232
12. Apr 2025 · 15:35 UTC
A really solid entry for a game made in only a few hours, well done. This is a very nice twist on the theme and the gameplay loop is simple but fun. English is not my mother tongue so I had to dig kind of deep to find good synonyms, which led to learning new words with some targeted research after playing :) Good job !