April 20th-23rd 2012 :: 10 Year Anniversary! :: Theme: Tiny World
Made by Klomer and Machinas!
We more or less stuck to compo rules, but there were two of us, so I guess we're jamming!!
A white hole has opened up and is threatening to explode your planets by enlarging them as they get closer to the center of the singularity. Spell words to use your shrink ray so that they can get small enough to use your teleporter to pull these tiny worlds to safety!
PROTIPS:
* enter key submits, space clears words
* mispell a word to get new letters!
* dictionary only goes to 7 letter words. don't be too awesome, please.
Post Compo Edition Improvements:
* add support for 1, 2, and 8 letter words
* make backspace clear the last entered letter
* pull the screen edge repulsion further down from the top
* decrease score font size
* add a click response delay to the dialogs so they can't be closed accidentally
* moved the white hole down a bit
* experimenting with keyboard input for letters. let us know what you think. better? worse?
Downloads and Links
Ratings
 | Coolness | 73% |
| #48 | Innovation(Jam) | 3.55 |
| #62 | Fun(Jam) | 3.20 |
| #75 | Overall(Jam) | 3.35 |
| #94 | Theme(Jam) | 3.18 |
| #150 | Mood(Jam) | 2.65 |
| #152 | Audio(Jam) | 2.47 |
| #181 | Humor(Jam) | 1.90 |
| #193 | Graphics(Jam) | 2.63 |
Comments
A pretty cool concept. One minor annoyance was that the blocky pixel font can be difficult to read at a glance or from the corner of your eye: a more readable font would've made the game a little smoother to play.
@shaunxcode: you actually suffered to many casualties, so the game ended. it just says 'Victory' to make you feel better. You can go forever if you can avoid letting the planets blow up.
@j_peeba: yeah. i have trouble with U's and Vs in this font particularly. It's all just library default font blown up 4x, hehe.
I'm horrible at word games. It was fun though. I liked the idea of having to reuse letters, that doesn't seem to be common among word games.
@vandriver haha. i guess i should extend the dictionary. what was your word? I was also thinking of allowing two letter words for very small shrink.
Okay. Way to make me feel stupid :P I just got over-whelmed too easily playing this, but it's really well-done and I really enjoyed it for what it was.
I just sucked at it :P
I couldn't think of words that would work with the letters I had, so I kept panicing, then the planets started jiggling, then I really started to panic, then I froze, and then I lost. I tried a few rounds and gave up, but well done game!
@dagothig, @john_conder9: I think you'd be surprised how low the average scores are. it's pretty tough. Once things start going downhill, it's really hard to get back to a casual pace. I actually like that it gets the adrenaline pumping, but it could use some tuning or perhaps some difficulty levels.
You'd be surprised how much better you can get with a bit of practice though!
y, I really wish we'd had time to ramp the speed up, like in Tetris.
Remember that planets in the middle grow waaaay faster then ones on the outside!
Fun -- I would love to see things get more frantic or even a kind of puzzle mode.
One annoyance that could easily be fixed is that planets near the top are obscured by the HUD -- you should limit their position so they are always below the words of the HUD.
Cheers!
@namuol: yeah. the center is a bit too high in the tuning and there's a repulsion force that keeps them off the top. I could probably pull that down a bit too. Think I could shrink the scores as well.
Interesting, although pretty hard for me...
I still liked it though, although I wish I had more time to look at the letters and maybe even decide which planets I should try and use to either stop from exploding or make disappear. I found the game too fast, I just tried to make whatever word I could as fast as a could.
Maybe a slower difficulty curve would be better?
Although, for a competition game that most people are only going to play for a few minutes, this difficulty is pretty good because the games go fast.
@Jezzamon: Right now there isn't a curve. It's at the same difficulty the whole time. If / when I get to add a curve to it, it will definitely start out slower. Thanks for the input.
This concept was wicked, especially the fact that you peeps managed to adapt it to the theme. With a little bit of work regarding graphics and sound, this could become a gem of a game!
I really enjoyed it, even though I'm terrible at spelling games (especially when there's some pressure). Adding a little bit of a difficulty curve and some polish would turn this into something really great.
That...was...awesome! Of course, I love word games, but still!
I think this has huge chances of winning the "fun" category, too bad it doesn't have so many views. This is incredibly addictive, even though English is not my native language. Very creative! Congrats!
Interesting take on the theme. The controls got in the way of the game a bit- it's a game about words, so it would make more sense to use the keyboard for input than the mouse. I see you experimented with that in the post-compo version. But all in all this is great work for 48 hours!
Fun game, nice to see a word based puzzler in here, had a good time playing!
We tried the keyboard afterwords, and imo the results are mixed. It starts to feel like other word games, rather then feeling unique. Consider it an experiment in word game controls. Try both and let us know what you think!
This is a really great game. The concept is awesome and the gameplay makes it work. The graphics are nice, and sound are good, but it could use some music. Very fun.
Oh, wow... this is quite a surprise. Congratulations, the premises are interesting and the game is very entertaining.
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I am a sucker for word based games so this hit the spot. wish it would have just let me keep playing instead of saying I had achieved victory (which was nice, I just like to go for the gold).