Hi,
I played your game. Used Windows 11 Google Chrome browser.
First impressions. Visuals are ok. One small thing on the main menu: the hover effects on the play buttons are a bit too subtle. A slightly more pronounced press-down effect would make them feel more satisfying to click. But that's only a problem if you're using a pc.
In-game UX. A few things tripped me up. When dragging letters, they appear way above the cursor. I'd prefer them right next to it, it feels much more natural.
The drawn tiles container was confusing. Letters were disappearing out of view and there was no indication that I needed to scroll. I'd suggest either adding a visible scrollbar, or expanding the container vertically so tiles stay in view. I noticed you also cap the number of tiles a player can hold and force to clear the board if they go over the limit. But there should be an indicator of that as well, you should have a number of tiles available/maximum.
I eventually figured out you can swap already-placed letters, but the offset between the cursor and the letters made it really hard to do reliably, especially under time pressure. Fixing the cursor alignment would help a lot here.
Audio. Suggestion for later down the road: consider enabling music by default at around 50% volume with a slider to adjust. Also worth noting, when the browser loses focus, the music stops but the game keeps going, and when you tab back in, the music restarts from the beginning. Might be worth addressing at some point.
Other thoughts. I'd consider removing the "replay tutorial" option from the settings menu, it felt a bit out of place there. Game is quite easy to understand, I doubt anyone would want to retry the tutorial again. Speaking about tutorial, you could show in the tutorial that you can swap already placed letters.
The cozy background sets the mood well. 🙂
For context, I played around 10 rounds and only managed to get 245 points, 5 words, 15 characters, it's quite a challenge.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Remi