Word Shot

undrev · June 13, 2019, 6:16pm

Hey Devs,

My first attempt to do something playable with Defold led me to this. Word Shot is a typing game. Your goal as a player is to correctly spell out all the words for a limited amount of time. The game is at the prototype/early alpha stage.

If you don’t mind ) I’ll be posting the development progress (if any) here. You may download/play the game at this page.

undrev · June 13, 2019, 6:21pm

britzl · June 13, 2019, 7:15pm

Nice! Congrats on releasing your first Defold game!

undrev · June 26, 2019, 2:30pm

It was amazed to see my yet humble creation has been mentioned in the recent Defold’s newsletter. Got a huge motivation boost! Thanks, guys!

undrev · July 5, 2019, 5:25pm

The 0.2.12 update comes with: a brand new Challenge mode, an ability to select difficulty levels, some music and sfx, english dictionary w/ 772 words and other improvements.

It took some time to do some “background” stuff like UI elements, options, templates, sounds… However, it was quite exciting!

undrev · July 30, 2019, 3:03pm

I continue to work on Word Shot. The 0.3.22 update comes with: a brand new Relax mode (w/o a timer), player’s metrics and some statistics, english vocabulary w/ 1700 words and other improvements.

Now you may measure your word typing speed and compare it with your friends ones!

ross.grams · July 30, 2019, 6:26pm

This is nice! I like the visual design, the sounds are pretty good, and everything works the way I expect. It’s even got an options menu with sliders?! So fancy! Haha. I haven’t seen the 5-keystroke WPM measurement before, that’s a good idea. (Now that I think about it, I’m not sure why typing isn’t measured by characters-per-minute.)

A few bits of critique/suggestions:

The dialog with three buttons that pops up when you finish a stage…I have no idea what those buttons do? Well, I mean I tried them all and now I do, but I think they should have appropriate text on them, not just weird symbols. Not to mention it’s a different style from the rest of the UI.
The same dialog box, it says “Level complete!”, but then you keep going! And you escape back to the menu and you can’t move on to the next level. This is confusing. I would say: “Stage 1 of 5 completed.” or something like that.
Having something in-game that shows how many stages there are total would be nice. You see “1-1”, “1-2”, etc., but you don’t know how long it will go on.
Saving your options and level unlock for the next time you play would be a nice upgrade.
The “Boo-de-lee!” sound (a good description, right?) when you complete a word gets pretty annoying pretty quickly. Maybe you can just lower the volume a bit, I’m not sure. Ideally all the sounds would have some random variation each time, too bad Defold doesn’t support that out-of-the-box…
It makes sense with the little scrabble-tile boxes you have around the letters, but having the letters spaced so far apart does make it a little hard to read. It does kind of force you to see them as separate letters instead of a word, but for me I think it slows down my typing a bit, since it takes me a fraction of a second longer to grasp the whole word.
Playing with the mouse…whew that’s hard. I think it would be a lot nicer if the clickable letters where closer to the word on the “blackboard”. Especially since they have the completely opposite visual contrast. I found myself mentally unscrambling the letters at the bottom, rather than looking up to read the word on the blackboard first and then looking back down.

undrev · July 31, 2019, 3:14pm

Thanks for your thoughts!

The 5-keystroke WPM is a sort of a “standard” approach to define an average word’s length in a language. I read it on wiki. The game handles 3 to 13 characters length words, so I decided to show a player both values.

Frankly, I didn’t do graphics stuff much yet. The most of visuals came from a prototype. Neat, but simple. I want to replace the dialogs and buttons later on.

That’s a good point! There are 9 levels in the game. Each level consists of 5 sub-levels. Probably, to re-name them as “stages” would be more correctly.

Will be definitely implemented later.

I will check that “Boo-de-lee!” sound again. Need to get more votes to decide its destiny.

As for the letters, all I can do in the current screen layout is to minimize spacing between them.

undrev · September 30, 2019, 5:34pm

The latest 0.4.11 update comes with: 2 new game types (Word Learning and Word Guessing), 16 vocabularies (combinations of English, French, Italian, Russian languages), some UI improvements.

I wanted at the beginning and got few requests later on to have the game multilingual. The vocabularies took pretty much time to collect, verify and combine the words into the data files. The current build supports 4 different languages: English, French, Italian, Russian and any their combinations.

I had some concerns how Defold would handle languages with diacritics, but it works with such input quite well. So you may typing the words, let’s say, in French by a keyboard:

Two new game mechanics have been implemented: Word Learning and Word Guessing.

Word Learning - translate (and type) the word located at the top of black board to your language.

Word Guessing - sort of a scramble game. You have nothing but the letters, try to recover the hidden word.

As for the game play, in general, it’s done.