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Swap Out and Bingo Buddy's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Community choice | #11 | 3.240 | 3.500 |
Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Team Name
H. H. Magoo
Team members
This is a solo project by me, Kendra, also known as H. H. Magoo
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Comments
I can see myself playing this for too long.
I like the mechanic. Could use a little big of a control tweak. I kept wanting to drag the tiles around. Tapping and then tapping again to release felt a little uncomfortable. Some gentle feedback like clicks when tiles move could go a long way. A button to shuffle all the letters would also do nicely, as it's a function I wish I had.
All-around quite enjoyable.
Video impressions at https://vimeo.com/814742533
This is good for what it is, but it’s not quite ambitious / unique enough to stand out from the myraid of phone-word-games. Which, admittedly, is a saturated market.
It’s good that you aimed for a limited scope and hit what you were going for. Contrary to the usual advice, try to reach for a little bit more next time.
I really, really enjoyed watching you play my game. You clearly know what making a word game entails and brought real insights.
To answer a few of your questions:
- the Priscella who dominates the Leaderboard is my mom. Of all the dozens of games I've made, this is her favourite. She plays every day after she Wordles.
- I used a dictionary of the 23110 seven-letter words culled from the 172820 word list on Peter Norvig's website. I would be curious to compare it with the one you mentioned.
- Yes, Bingo Buddy handles anagrams. If it wants GALLERY, but you find ALLERGY, you get full credit. It shows you're cool that you thought to ask that.
- I fully recognize that it is not unique enough to compete with similar games. My main goal in making it was to learn how to use a StreamReader to speed up processing large text files. On that measure, it was a success!
- It connects to the theme of "the odds are good" because when the jam started I was reading a book about Scrabble championships that mentioned that the odds of your first seven Scrabble tiles containing a word is 12.6%. I became interested in exploring the mathematics of how those odds would increase if one were allowed a single swap of any number of tiles of your choice. My hunch is that for expert level players, just one swap would make the odds quite good. Allowing a single swap wasn't a fun game for non-experts, though, so I upped it to ten.
It’s genuinely interesting to hear the thought process behind it, and it sounds like you have some passion for this kind of project.
Keep exploring and see where it takes you!
As an aside my parsing of the https://kaikki.org/dictionary/English/index.html data has 64405 7-letter words – I dropped proper nouns and slang to the best of my ability. You can download the word list (sans definition / word type) here
I'm a big fan of vocabulary games like Scrabble and Words With Friends. This game adds a new way to play that formula that's less involved and solo. I could see this game being very successful as a mobile app. Imagine you're sitting on a train or waiting for someone in your car and you want to play something to stimulate your brain. This would be perfect. Consider adding an exp/level up system for winning with unlockables such as "Lock two letters in the right place," "give me a definition of the word," "What does it start with?" etc. This has potential!
Thank you so much for your positive feedback! I will let you know when I release a mobile build.
This is very relaxing and enjoyable! This seems like a game I would replay a bunch if slightly more polished.
I'm so happy to hear that! I would love to hear your suggestions for what I should polish.