DEVLOG #9: WIP Page System, Options Menu, PvP and Multiplayer QOL - Wordpetition DEMO
Started adding in some really funny animations to the ui, they’re basically everywhere now (every major menu has a little unique animation). Tweens are way too much fun and convenient.
i also did things other than this
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The Pages and Chapters book system is now functional!
Now I just need to add in boss blinds and make the progression system more clear (the little 0/4 on the bottom is supposed to be the chapter count).
ALT TEXT:
A open book with beige-ish pages and a dark brown cover. The book is shown in front with the regular game in the background.
The left page has a blue circular icon with a darker blue W in the center of the icon. Below the blue icon, the left page has the title “Light Reading”. Below the title text it says “Target Score: $600.”
The right page has an orange circular icon that imitates the fire’s colors. It also has a red (with a little orange) W in the center of the icon. Below the orange icon, the right page has the title “Long Reading”. Below the title text it says “Target Score: $1200.”
Here’s an idea. Give the white checkered patter in the background a super slight tint of some kind of colour (preferably the complimentary colour of your UI such as the book etc. ) to make it pop a bit more.
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That’s a great idea, thanks! I put something like it in the game.
Demo soon? Wondering what’s not ready; the game looks in a good enough state for a demo! If it’s not game-breaking, you should totally give us something to try out. Getting a demo ready ASAP gives you vital feedback, and getting that feedback before you overcommit to a certain design decision is huge. It’s happened to my games before, leading them to be much less fun than they could be.
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Definitely soon, what’s not ready is just:
- The Shop
- Credits
- Options
- 8 more Word Cards, 42/50 Words Cards have been added so far. (balatro’s demo had like 50)
- Win screen
- Other miscellaneous polish like animating the game over screen, animating the book, etc.
I’ve been mainly avoiding putting out a demo immediately in order to make sure everyone’s first experience with the game is as good as possible. It’s going to be really fun when it’s finished.
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Watch out!
yapping
This is a very dangerous mentality, at least from personal experience. I pushed myself to create a certain number of items for my own game when trying to get a demo out, and ended up polluting the item pool to death from trying to create a high quantity of items. I ended up having to spend weeks balancing, cutting items from the pool, and making sure everything synergized (My game has slight Balato inspiration). I suggest not holding yourself to a number, and adding cards with a clear meaning in mind. Balatro actually didn’t use 50 jokers in their demo, and that number will be unique to each game.
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DEVLOG #10: Pages/Chapters & WIP Shop, Multiplayer REWORK, More Word Cards, etc
Devlog below:
I FINISHED the pages and chapters system!
I also animated the book. Still need to add boss pages, but the book system is all there.
Right now I’m working on the shop:
The shop is going to allow gold to actually be used in-game. I still need to make it function though. It will also allow you to sell word cards :D
I also added in a bunch of new, unique, Word Cards!
Here are some of the coolest ones:
RAMEN: 2x fire, loses 0.005x fire per card drawn. (Uncommon).
COOKBOOK: Spawns a random food Word Card for every 5 valid words spelled consecutively. (LEGENDARY).
ARSONIST: When a space (or blank) is “scored”, destroy all cards behind it. Gains +1 fire for each card destroyed by this card. (Uncommon).
HINT: +75 points if the spelled word is a special word. Shows the closest special word, in the text box below the card. (Common).
HAND: Allows you to hold +8 more letters. Also gives +8 draws.
COOKBOOK is also the first legendary card in the game due being 8 letters long and using all 2 Ks initially in the game’s deck to spell. It’s also powerful enough to be legendary since you’re able to flood your normal deck with food cards, allowing for the Word Cards as normal cards mechanic to really shine.
MULTIPLAYER REWORK:
I also reworked the multiplayer turn system. Before it would ALWAYS pass the turn after one move, which led to nobody being able to spell the words they wanted (you couldn’t ever get close enough to the special word you needed).
It basically resulted in no special words being spelled, since your opponent would have to make an obvious mistake, often multiple times in a row. Now the game only passes the turn when you score a word, which allows for more word box control between both players.
I also added a tooltip to the player icons, which shows the stats of the player upon the icon being hovered.
I created a playtest for the demo!
I hope anyone who plays it has fun! It’s still a work in progress (no shop, no bosses, etc) and might contain a couple bugs, but the core game is still there.
Yes! The demo is here.
I’ll add my feedback to this post by editing it as I check out the demo.
First: it wasn’t clear how to play my word once I prepped it.
Second: I really want to be able to just type in the word I want, so when there are letter tiles in my hand, i use shift + letter, and all the tiles of that letter are identical, just auto-play that letter. Dragging is annoying.
Third: I spelled “yellowed” and didn’t get a yellow bonus.
Fourth: Need some way to know if a word will score before committing to it.
Fifth: The turn system strongly encourages swapping the first letter to cycle through words, which is boring.
Sixth: Some kind of bias needs to exist on the randomness. I drew like 2-3 of the same letter but never drew the letter I needed to make a certain word.
Seventh: Word games are often about expanding your vocabulary, and even with a large vocabulary (I do quite well in games like Word Bomb), that skill expression felt lacking.
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Thank you so much for playing the playtest!
I’ll respond to all of the feedback you gave me:
First: I should definitely add a tutorial in-game.
Second: Typing mode is in the game, but it was changed to be caps lock (toggle) after it started being slightly painful to hold down shift. But it feels like shift might be more intuitive.
Third: oops, the color word list is definitely limited by my own vocabulary
Fourth: I’m kind of scared to add that in, since it’d be almost impossible to make a mistake if people absolutely know whether or not the word is valid.
Fifth: The first letter? I didn’t think it’d be possible to just change out the first letter everytime to get a scoring word. What word did you spell?
Sixth:
There’s no bias in the draws because I thought it’d be too easy to spell the exact word you want if there was bias. It’d be easy to get the exact same broken build/combo every run, and it would probably ruin the game.
A lot of the game is designed to discourage drawing letters unless completely necessary, and to instead try to work with whatever you have at the moment. Most of the fun in the game comes from just going with the flow and trying to make a combo along the way that works (at least that’s how I felt while testing it).
Although, there is bias during the starting hand draw animation sequence thing. You can’t get too many of the same letter during the start animation.
Seventh:
Oh 
I haven’t played many word games, so i’ll take your word for it.
The expanding your vocabulary part would probably come naturally if there was some kind of dictionary built into the game, since it’s really easy to spell words you don’t know.
I also forgot to add in something about the space tile in the how to play section of the playtest description (I was only expecting like, 5 people to play it, who already knew how the game was played).
Also! Use the space/blank tile to spell multiple words at the same time. All words will have to be valid and unused. The space will be removed from the word box. All of the word cards you have will also trigger twice, without fire (multiplier) resetting. Compound words can trigger twice this way as well.
Did you use it? I specifically added it in to try to add more depth/skill to the game. It’s meant to make long words more beneficial, like building a jenga tower and keeping it up.
Didn’t read or see, but good idea.
The main issue in skill expression RN is not knowing if a word will score or is possible. Example: I was at “loner” and wanted to spell “onerous”, but I got all the way there except for just one letter and had to spend heaps of costly turns to just discard the word box. We need a Discard All feature that just takes one turn.
As for word cycling, I can give you some examples: “yellow” to “yellowed” or to “mellow” or “fellow”.
Just went for another run, spelled “right” then “right east”. No scoring. These systems are a bit unintuitive. Balatro’s success, IMO, is largely due to how smooth it plays. The metagame is also quite complex with synergies. This game has the opposite. Playing just one turn is a struggle, and the metagame is rather simple.
The color cards need fixing. I got white, spelled “whites” and got nothing.
I nearly won, but the game didn’t recognize the words “dogginess”, “pigginess”, “lagginess”, or “droolers”, so I lost too many turns.
Needs a way to tell which words I’ve already played so I remember not to replay them.
For a game like this, there needs to be a joker catalog to browse so I can plan out a build. I was using short and ramen, having a good time, when I spell “one” and suddenly get a one card. Whoa! I understand you want that moment of discovery, but it’s actually just annoying. I was bothered that my fairly lucky run here could’ve been 10x better if I had known (but knowing this was impossible).
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Thanks for playing the game again, all of the feedback you’ve been giving is genuinely, extremely helpful.
I forgot to mention that all words separated by the space need to be valid, oops!
The metagame will hopefully get exponentially more complex as more Word Cards are added (and the shop/stickers/bosses). The game already has some depth with none of these, which is a good sign.
I excluded whites, yellowed, bluer, etc from the color cards because I thought it’d be too easy to just spell those words. I now realize that the exclusion is really confusing, even if it was said in-game. I added the word variants (bluer, etc) of the color words to their categories. Yellower will now trigger yellow.
Just added those words to the list! (the game hasn’t been updated yet though). The open-source list I used unfortunately didn’t have those words.
(still is a really good free word list though)
Oh that’s already in the game. The word in the score preview (before the 10 x 3.24) will turn red when you’re about to play a used word. I made it more clear by making it say (USED) before the word, while still turning red.
I’m going to add in a dictionary that shows all discovered Word Cards.
To hopefully fix this, I’m going to make it so that whenever you get an extra Word Card it’ll be added to a guaranteed draw queue (the card will always be drawn next). The queue will allow people to still be surprised by new Word Cards, while allowing players to not get punished from literally just playing the game normally. After the card is drawn, the player can then decide whether to swap one of their Word Cards out for the new card, or discard it.
Discard All might break the game, it’d completely remove all risk and strategy when it comes to playing really long words.
You’d be able to randomly spell Antidisestablishmentarianism or something and just be okay afterward. The game would become just spelling the longest word possible for all of the reward and none of the risk. It’d be like the reverse of the Pair problem Balatro has.
A really fun/intense part of the game is trying to recover from Antidisestablishmentarianism (or a realistically long example) without losing the whole thing from not being able to spell a nearby word the next round. Being able to get so many points in one round in exchange for being put in a difficult situation makes the balance between long and short words actually work. Otherwise it’d just be objectively better to use a longer word than a shorter one. The nuance in the decision between long (more risk and more rewards) and short (less risk and less rewards) makes the core game have more strategy.
Also multiplayer would basically have no player interaction, since the box would just be reset if you got the other player into a bad position.
Thanks again for the feedback! It was really good.
I was thinking of adding a entire draw queue, but it was literally just one quick change here.
Extra word cards will now go directly to your held letters instead of the pile, which should fix the “one” problem.
No, the “one” problem was that I didn’t know such a card existed. I liked how the one card appeared in the joker list when the word was spelled, that’s all right.
As for antidisestablishmentarianism: That word is impossible in the current game to spell. You may want to adjust how turns work, because it makes bold plays or word knowledge a bit useless. Each blind probably needs more than one word, but after just one word, just placing the letter tiles for another already puts you long over the turn limit and you die. Plus, you were talking about short words needing a balance, but in Balatro, a Royal Flush beats a Pair pretty much any day until you’re really late-game.
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The game now tells you whether or not the word is special.
You can also swap out Word Cards when they are in your held letters (so that it wouldn’t be absurdly punishing and unfair if you accidentally spelled “misprint” or something).
The extra word cards location was changed to the held letters to make the mechanic less rng-heavy and more used.
I also need to find a way to communicate the mechanic where you can swap special cards out.
I just played a couple of rounds, great fun! I really like the premise, as it takes the main challenge from just spelling long words, to picking words that will anagrammatize into other words.
You seem to take feedback really well, so here are some thoughts of mine 
Some feedback on the mechanics of the game, numbered for ease of reference:
- Drawing cards should have a cost (obviously not a turn), or just automatically fill the hand as space opens up - currently, there is no decision involved in drawing. This would not be the case if the player could put cards back in the hand. I’d suggest not allowing returning to hand for free, as some letters are very valuable (ex. D and S), and the player should have to play well to keep them, rather than always have them on hand.
- You could introduce Scrabble style scoring, making harder / rarer letters more valuable, to offset their difficulty. Currently there’s not much reason to play something like an X, as it will statistically produce fewer words than, say, E A T and S. That would also introduce an element of risk-reward decision-making.
I see that the fire mechanic does something similar, but it’s not obvious to the player which words qualify as “weird/unique”. - How is the player supposed to know the special words that make jokers (for lack of a better word) appear? If the game just gives the player one at random at the start of each game, that’s fine, especially if they get unlocked and the code-words made visible, so the player doesn’t have to remember each one. You might want to give a new one each round / level / … that way the player gets more of a reward for getting farther. Maybe only the first one is guaranteed to be an undiscovered one?
- I think it would be a good idea to have a (alphabetized fold-out) list of played words - I regularly found myself forgetting if I’d played this or that word, and although the player can see this just before spelling the word, it’s no help if two or more letters are needed to (re)spell a word. Also, it feels good to see a growing list of played words - you could put a number on the fold-out icon which will also serve as a kind of “personal high score” in terms of played words. Players - me included - like to see numbers go up
- It would make hand overview a little easier if cards were grouped, for instance by showing them stacked, or simply with a number on the card if there are more than one. Currently the player has to sort the hand manually and / or count cards to check how many Os there are, and thus whether that letter is okay to discard. Note that this would necessitate having a number on the hand (ie 20/26), as the area covered by cards would no longer be a dependable indicator of how full the hand is.
- A suggestion - currently the code word jokers are pretty hard to get unless you specifically know them and go for them. You could make them trigger by a group of words, so rather than “APPLE” you might allow any kind of fruit. This might only apply to weaker, “common” jokers. This wouldn’t make the game any better or worse, but players would end up with more jokers that could obviously be balanced accordingly. It really depends on whether you’re going for more of a meticulous head-scratcher (one joker = one word) or a playful partygame (one joker = many words). The latter would also allow the player to think and come up with words in a category, rather than just memorizing words.
UI stuff:
- I’ve skimmed through the feedback, and concerning dragging, I don’t find that boring or slow. That may be personal preference, but I find that moving letters around helps with inspiration, and it’s quite rare that I needed to play more than one letter from hand before switching to reordering. Besides, the letter will need to be placed in the correct position anyway, so dragging will often be inevitable.
- The screen area looks like it might be made for mobile - if that’s the case, you’ll need some clever solution for moving tiles around, as they’re too small for a phone touch screen at the moment.
I hope you don’t take all these words as dismissive nay-saying I really like your game and I hope to see more of it!
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Thanks! I’m glad that the main premise of the game was fun.
Drawing cards do have a little bit of a cost. You lose one draw (separate currency) per letter drawn. It’s mostly just there to prevent the player from drawing too much and not playing the game. You only get one draw per three letters scored, so using draws instead of repeatedly triggering the same letter (wordrepetition) is discouraged. You were probably playing the game as intended (
), so you didn’t feel the cost.
I don’t know why I didn’t allow that, that’s really cool idea! It’d work in multiplayer too. I’m definitely testing this out on my own copy of the game.
Even if it doesn’t work in the core game, it’s a perfect Word Card. I was already somewhat thinking of adding a card that’d do exactly this (FREEDOM or something), inspired by modded balatro.
There’s scrabble-style scoring in the game itself :D. The points you gain from the word is dependent on the letters (Z giving more points, etc). I couldn’t find space on the sprite itself for the letter scores, so it unintentionally became a bit of a hidden mechanic in the playtest. The game would definitely be improved by showing letter scores though, so that Z/X/K/Y-type letters would feel more valuable. Thanks for pointing this out.
I could try to add an example of how fire works to the tooltip. I struggled to find the words to describe the mechanic when I made the description. Maybe something like:
For example, adding the letter S to the end of the word will significantly reduce the base fire of the word. The letter S is at the end of many words (e.g hints, apples, blueprints), so the overall word will be less unique.
The special words are mainly supposed to be discovered using the hint and the starter words. The special words dictionary is going going to added soon, after I’m done with the bosses.
Definitely.
A sort button might help. The keyboard shortcuts can highlight a specific letter to sort of make the hand more usable, but that won’t work on mobile/controller. Grouped letters could work.
I kind of like the guarantee that the different words shown in the hint are new content/unique cards, it makes the game mechanics feel a bit more strong. Having a bunch of words point to the same joker might leave the player disappointed if a word feels like it should be its own thing (e.g apple vs banana).
It also faces the same development issues that the color cards (blue, red, etc) face with their categories. If a player spells a random obscure fruit and it doesn’t give them APPLE or something else, they’d feel like they were cheated out of a win (like with the colors). It would result in it taking more time to go through the Wikipedia list of fruit and manually copy every single one to the APPLE category than if I just gave BANANA a unique card.
I’m definitely trying to have the game be both a casual party game and a complex strategic head-scratcher type game, many words = many cards.
Thank you! The feedback was really helpful. I definitely know what systems to prioritize after reading it. I’m glad you cared so much about the game, enough to type all of this out. It’s really motivating to see people like the game.
Drawing cards: Is there ever a situation where the player has room to draw a card, but wouldn’t want to?
Scrabble scoring: Since it’s already there, my feedback becomes “the score of a letter should be shown to the player somehow” For example, you could enlarge a card that’s being dragged and show the value only then, but that wouldn’t work so well with touch interaction, since one’s finger would obscure the card. You could show the value above each player letter, but then one would have to play a letter to see the value. Or you could have a Balatro style (poker hands) score sheet, but then the player would have to remember the values when the sheet is not shown. Any of these work “well enough”, but none are perfect… I’m sure it’s doable though
Fire: The fact that you, the creator, struggled to find a clear way to describe it, might be an indicator that it’s not a particularly clear mechanic. It doesn’t absolutely have to be, but maybe that’s an area to try and work on to make more obvious and predictable for the player.
Hand overview: A simple solution would be automatically (or at the press of a button) alphabetizing the hand. That will make it much easier to spot where there are duplicates, and as an added bonus also makes it easier to check if a particular letter is there. Some players might like to move the cards in hand around to get inspiration for spelling things out - for that reason, a sort button might be best.
Getting jokers / word categories: I think you’re right to be wary of designing / coding the word categories, and that may be reason enough to avoid them. I regularly played words that seemed definitely to be within a category but didn’t trigger (ie “blues” as a blue word) and they’ll all be work-intensive to create and test. I would note that “fruits” is a much easier category to develop than “words relating to blue” - you might consider reducing the number of abstract categories, and focusing more on “listable” ones (ie go to Wikipedia → Fruits, a pretty comprehensive list of fruits). Some categories are iron-clad, like “planets in the solar system”, and thus much easier to create and test.
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