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Only one word's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #17 | 4.696 | 4.696 |
| Adherence to the Theme | #58 | 4.609 | 4.609 |
| Overall | #173 | 4.145 | 4.145 |
| Design | #940 | 3.130 | 3.130 |
Ranked from 23 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
I enjoyed this quite a bit. It is challenging and stressful as you watch that clock tick up to try and find a good word. I think this would be a lot of fun as a race type game similar to the wiki game.
Thank you! I think so too. Probably the best future this game could have would be as a mobile game where you can challenge your friends and chat in between sessions. And I think I would then change it so that you have maybe 1 minute per article, and you get 1 point for each word you find plus extra points if you find a word within the first 10 seconds, one that's maximum 4 characters long, if you get a word on your first attempt, and so on.
I have no idea how you did this or even came up with such a unique idea, but it actually works pretty well! I did notice a bit of a "bug" though, since the article chosen is completely random: I got the same article on my first two tries. Also, just out of curiosity, why did you choose milliseconds with so many decimals for your timer? It seemed a bit unnecessary and kind of distracting in my opinion. Otherwise, the game was very interesting and definitely an original concept!
Thank you! I was recently playing a real world game with some friends where we had to pick numbers of increasing size in magazines we were reading, trying to one up each other as closely as possible, which is not a great game in and of itself, but we had fun with it. I wanted to make a similar concept for a video game, but have it more measurable somehow, so then I came up with this :) I also love taking something and completely changing the way you look at it - like how in this case an informative article becomes a treasure hunt.
With regards to the bug, I picked only 15 articles (that were the featured articles on Wikipedia that day) to make sure you don't get some crap one, and that was already the end of my 10 hours, so even though I had many more plans of letting you play a couple of rounds and stuff, I just added a reset button and shipped it!
About the decimals, I made it in Firefox which doesn't have the decimals :) I agree they shouldn't be there! I just used the built-in browser preformance measuring tool. Turns out it's not consistent between browsers (inconsistencies between browsers on the web!? Who would have thought!?)
Thank you for the feedback and the questions!
Really cool idea! I found a loophole though. In the article in the image, I just picked Mercury-Atlas cause that wasn't related to the article at all. So if you ever make an updated version it might be a good idea to have it remove the "This article is about..." notes.
Hahaa! You're just too clever :D I love hearing about these tricks that people come up with. That goes on the bug list.
What a refreshing interpretation of the theme. I am really interested in the technical stuff going on in the background. Are there Wikipedia pages that don't have a word appear only once?
Happy to hear you enjoy it!
Ok, for the technical bit, let's define some terms. A word is any word, reused or not. "word hello word" has 3 words. A unique word would be any word featured in the article one or more times. "word hello word" has 2 unique words ("word" and "hello"). A solo word is a word that exist only once. "word hello word" has 1 solo word ("hello").
After I had published the game (I could only work on Sunday, so I was crazy rushed), I added a debug feature to my game to get some statistics. I opened maybe 10 random articles, and more or less no matter the length of the article, roughly 2/3 of the unique words were solo words. However, only about 15% of all the words were solo words. That means that about 85% of the text is comprised of 1/3 of the unique words. Fascinating! Anyway, the fact that it was as consistent as it was surprised me. After having played around a lot just guessing in my browser with ctrl+f (my prototype!), I felt quite confident that I could pick any article and it would work, but that a longer article would be more fun. I then just went to the page where Wikipedia puts featured articles and put them all in the game, so those are the 15 articles of which you will receive one at random. I actually had only tried one of them when I uploaded the game, which made me slightly nervous :D The reason I wanted to get some statistics afterwards was that I got lucky a few times when trying it out and felt it was too easy. Then it turned out that all the articles I checked had hundreds of solo words each! That became even more discouraging when I compared it to the number of unique words to find that 2/3 unique words were solo words. But then when I realized I had to compare to total words and found about 15% I was satisfied at last. But there are about 6 million articles on Wikipedia, so there might still be one or two without solo words, although I think humans also actively try to vary their language, which helps if you're a solo word hunter.
On the more computer technical side there's especially one technical thing I found surprising. Overall the game is very simple - the tricky bit was mostly to make it really feel like you're browsing Wikipedia while being able to check if the word is actually a solo word, because browsers have a LOT of security against reading any type of data from any domain other than the one you're currently on, so as soon as I show something from Wikipedia, I can't access it at all from the code if it even loads in the first place. I still didn't want to just download and republish copies of the articles though, because it just felt wrong and would probably be illegal and difficult to pull off well either way. In the end I had to use the official Wikipedia API with some special cross-browser settings on both ends, extract the data from there and use the extracted data to compare against the words you enter. At the same time I load an iframe with the same article so you can scroll around and read. In other words, the article is actually downloaded twice in different ways, and what you see from Wikipedia and what goes on underneath the hood are completely separate from each other (which is also why you can't guess a word by double clicking it).
This became a bit long, but that's what you get for asking fun questions :) I'll gladly tell you more if you're interested.
Oh wow. This is super interesting! I didn't even know Wikipedia had a proper API, even less one that would let you do something like this. You should write a post mortem devlog where you could actually explain stuff in even more detail and I would be happy to read that!
Thank you for taking the time to explain though!
Wow, cool alternative little game. Great idea, wish there was a little more incentive to do well and progress more, but overall great.
Thank you! I agree completely. I could only work on this on the Sunday, but I was planning online high scores for different categories (shortest word, fastest time, fewest attempts, best "overall", something along those lines). I also think you should be given a few articles and have an overall timer and get some statistics afterwards :)
Really fun game and awesome way to interpret the theme! Definitely a game I'll check out with friends to have some fun (maybe a competitive mode in the future? :) ). Anyways, great job!
Thank you! It would be pretty cool to make a heat or something, where you all get the same article at the same time! I could make and upload a version for you where you can at least select the article manually to make sure you have the same if you're serious about playing with your friends :)
Cool and original concept, and it's surprisingly challenging!
Thank you! I'm happy to hear that you found it challenging - that was my original thought as well when I just went to wikipedia to try it out ("prototyping" was the fastest I've ever done! Went to Wikipedia, pressed "random article", ctrl+f, match whole words, and I could play my game :D). But then as I was working on it, quite a few times I just by chance entered a random word from the article and got a right answer on the first try, which really wasn't very much fun at all (which is why I think the game should have you complete a few articles in a row, so that even if you get your first one on your first try you still get to experience the challenge as you go). Thank you for playing and commenting, I'll make sure to play yours too :)
Thank you! I also think trying to find shorter words adds challenge as well, so the letter counter is a nice touch.
ok so I used the cmd+f to search the page so I was somewhat cheating... But even with that functionality it was like a race to find a word that actually only appeared one and it was intense and fun.
The game technically has endless replayability which is awesome.
So far this was by far the most original game I saw. I was not expecting to see anything like this. I know people have made up wikipedia games where you try to find your way to a certain page via links.
But I found this way more interesting. This was really cool
Oh I didn't realize you commented here! I'm so happy to hear you had fun with it, and that it felt original, which was my main goal this time around. I'll make sure to give yours a proper play through!
Very original.
Thank you :)
Great idea!
Thanks! :D