added evil censorship
don’t worry, you can turn it off in the options menu.
(the playtest still has not yet been updated)
Added bosses to the game!
I also renamed Turns Left to Turns Taken. Since the number going up while also being called Turns Left was too confusing.
Added a tooltip to the space, so that people know that it isn’t a wildcard.
I also added the ability for letters to have tooltips depending on their letter (so I could add in the space tooltip).
https://happyholo.itch.io/wordpetition/devlog/1463123/devlog-11-bosses-qol-fixes
BOSS Music: BookFace Remix - tobylane
https://pixabay.com/music/beats-bookface-remix-115827/
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I’ve been working on a couple of things for the game for the past 5 days, including:
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Boss Dialogue for when you trigger the boss (already added, it shows up on the icon when the boss triggers)
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Card Upgrades, where a specific card can permanently gain points, fire, or xFire. (points/HIKER work)
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Letter tooltips showing up when you quickly click them (it won’t be on hover since that’d be annoying).
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A Run Info screen, including a expanded version of the letter/card pile where you can drag cards around to view them (the expanded pile is already done)
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A bookmark page skipping system (partially done, I just need to add in skip rewards)
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A possible public lobby system?? Still don’t know how to set it up without steam existing, but I do want people to actually be able to play the multiplayer mode without IP/Port stuff (and having friends). It’d definitely add a lot of replay value, plus the multiplayer mode is probably the main highlight of the game.
I’m probably going to wait until I add in hearts/multiplayer bosses before trying this.
I’m waiting on myself to actually finish these things before I make an entire devlog, but development on the game has been going well!
Looking forward to trying them 
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May I offer NodeTunnel and Talo, my two favorite plugins? Together they offer accounts, logging in, public lobbies, and p2p multiplayer. Basically everything Steam offers, and since your game isn’t even realtime, this should do the trick for free pretty much forever.
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DEVLOG #12: Info Screen, New Boss, Boss Dialogue, HIKER, and Letter Tooltips - Wordpetition DEMO:
DEVLOG BELOW:
Added a new BOSS to the game (shown at end of video)!
Added an info screen to the game. It can show you an expanded version of the card pile, where you can inspect all of the cards in the pile. It can also show you the book, which displays the next boss/page and current boss/page. It also shows a WIP stat menu (still need to add more stats to the stat menu) which currently includes all of the words you used during the round.
I also added in a tooltip to the letters which can be shown by clicking directly on it, without dragging.
Seeds now function and are shown in the pause menu. The new run screen can be accessed during the game without need to quit the run, kinda like how it works in balatro, been playing that game a lot more lately, which might influence the game a littl-
Added in the HIKER Word Card!
It permanently upgrades any card scored by 1 point. Totally not inspired by any other game, but it works really well and plays entirely different in this game since the main premise of the game is to REUSE letters/cards over and over again (sound familiar?). Deck fixing (the main playstyle of the other, different hiker in that other, different game) also doesn’t work out in this game, since you need every letter in the game to succeed at spelling words. You can’t just get rid of all of your Es like you would get rid of all of your 2s in balatro. The card ultimately ends up feeling and playing entirely different, it’s also more fun since you benefit from it immediately.
Talo and NodeTunnel look amazing, I actually got the idea of adding in a lobby system from the post you linked lol. Thanks!
l’m really excited to see you try it :D. The demo is definitely getting closer to completion!
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Apparently just setting the hint distance to 2 instead of 5 made the game 100x more fun. I thought it was unbalanced at first, but it actually brings the game closer to the original insane idea of every word giving you a special card. The game plays a lot better now, since it doesn’t rely too much on remembering random special words.
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Nice! 
Did you update the demo?
Nope
Not yet, I just need to add in/fix a few more things before updating the playtest. Like the win screen and other bug fixes. It’s 100% happening soon though!
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Finished up the dictionary, added a win/lose screen, fixed some things, etc.
Mostly just need to finally figure out how to add a shop, will definitely have to rewrite some of the game’s code.
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The main design of the shop has been finished. I’ve also implemented a in-game dictionary, since the game’s design causes you to spell many words you don’t know. Its going to be pretty cool once its all finished
The shop’s previous design has also been completely scrapped in favor of something more unique (aka not exactly the same as balatro)
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Also the dollars ($) have been changed to points (P), and the scrolling background is no longer scrolling, but now has random doodles scrolling past in the background (less motion sickness and looks cooler).
The doodles can be popped like bubble wrap if you click on them
Art for NAG A RAM (anagram), one of the new cards from the demo. It makes reorders cost less turns, which is cool.
About half of the Word Cards in the OG playtest have been rebalanced or changed in some way, a lot of them should be more fun now
For example (there’s also a bunch of other balance changes, but these are the most major):
All of the numbered Word Cards have also been rebalanced. They now scale much better to how hard it is to spell whatever word of x length the number card needs to be spelled. Even numbers now also give fire instead of points, since ‘even number = red’ like kindergarten or something.
ONE now makes single letters infinitely usable, making them spam-able. Before (still is though, haven’t updated anything yet), it was basically useless since you would use all 26 letters of the alphabet really quickly.
The color cards now all have unique effects, depending on their color.
RED → Now multiplies fire (fire is red, duh).
WHITE → Now gives extra turns, by reducing the counter of how many turns you’ve already taken (turns taken are associated with white in-game).
GREEN → Now gives extra draws (draws are associated with green in-game).
BLACK → Now scales in additive fire per word associated with the color black spelled, still only triggers when a word associated with the color black is spelled.
BLUE → Still adds points, unchanged (stats have been changed though)
A lot of the pattern-based Word Cards (color or number) were really boring or just not good, so the balance changes should 100% help those cards out.
Other than that, most of the changes word-card wise is the addition of many more cards. I don’t want to spoil them all, its more fun if they get discovered naturally (i did just kinda spoil anagram though).
Here’s what the game’s dictionary looks like! It shows you your discovered Word Cards (unrelated to the other word definition dictionary that is also now in the game).
probably the most surreal part of the game’s codebase is the fact that theres casually just a entire interpreted programming language written in gdscript used only for card effects and nothing else.
The game’s development is mostly going a little slow due to irl responsibilities and the amount of polish that I try to put into everything. But i like the guarantee that the next update is going to be really good for a lot of the games that I play, so I’m kind of applying that sort of perfectionism to Wordpetition too (to reasonable extent obviously, only for quality assurance).
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Probably the main issue with the playtest in retrospect was the confusion of memorization for actual strategy and depth, tbh I can’t believe I thought needing to remember so many specific special words like that was fun.
Hopefully the second version of the playtest (when its done at least) should be better strategy-wise, with more of a focus on knowing actual combos and more real strategy.
Currently working on making bosses use the same system as the WordCards instead of being hard-coded scripts, since it’s just easier to do it now than later (modding support + multiplayer is super hard to add after a game has already been made)
After that’s done, I also recently regained access to my itch.io account, so a new playtest version (1.5) will probably be released with only bosses and not the shop, since the shop (which is like 50% done now) will change the gameplay by a lot (and hopefully for the better lmao).
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