The snap and compass respectively, while being very powerful, feel slightly as though they break the spirit of the game. I spent a long time looking for the first 10 words to find, and unlocked the snap ability. From there I could spam click through words until I got the compass, and then it's just a game of clicking each letter through and seeing which one makes it go higher, and repeat. Still, I enjoyed it and the design is very neat :)
I agree... I designed the game as a pure word ladder at first, but it simply was too hard to "find your way" to the goal, because usually all letters need to be changed at least once to reach it (the graph distance is about 20 nodes between the words).
I only discovered how hard this is halfway through programming the game, so, I tried to fix it with the powerups, but they kinda ruined the puzzling element completely.
If anyone got any idea on how to solve that design problem, I'm all ears!
Your wordlist seems a little.... restrictive? I couldn't get any word ending in 'S' to be accepted - SINGS, FORTS, SEEDS, SPIES, ... as well as some others e.g. PRISE.
The first four are because I copied it from Wordle's list, which doesn't have plurals, and I kinda want to keep it that way. but Prise is a good one to add! probably the NYT removed british spellings?
Ah, I had no idea that U.S. spells prise with a "z"! But surely SINGS/SEEDS/SPIES are present tense verbs as well as plural nouns? If you're going to keep an intentionally-restricted dictionary, perhaps it might be interesting to have it _only_ populated with singular nouns? That way it feels like each step is a transformation between objects rather than words?
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The snap and compass respectively, while being very powerful, feel slightly as though they break the spirit of the game. I spent a long time looking for the first 10 words to find, and unlocked the snap ability. From there I could spam click through words until I got the compass, and then it's just a game of clicking each letter through and seeing which one makes it go higher, and repeat. Still, I enjoyed it and the design is very neat :)
I agree... I designed the game as a pure word ladder at first, but it simply was too hard to "find your way" to the goal, because usually all letters need to be changed at least once to reach it (the graph distance is about 20 nodes between the words).
I only discovered how hard this is halfway through programming the game, so, I tried to fix it with the powerups, but they kinda ruined the puzzling element completely.
If anyone got any idea on how to solve that design problem, I'm all ears!
Your wordlist seems a little.... restrictive? I couldn't get any word ending in 'S' to be accepted - SINGS, FORTS, SEEDS, SPIES, ... as well as some others e.g. PRISE.
The first four are because I copied it from Wordle's list, which doesn't have plurals, and I kinda want to keep it that way. but Prise is a good one to add! probably the NYT removed british spellings?
Ah, I had no idea that U.S. spells prise with a "z"! But surely SINGS/SEEDS/SPIES are present tense verbs as well as plural nouns? If you're going to keep an intentionally-restricted dictionary, perhaps it might be interesting to have it _only_ populated with singular nouns? That way it feels like each step is a transformation between objects rather than words?
"prise" and "prize" are two completely different words. we don't spell "prise" with a Z.