Post by Tahnan in Phantom Index comments

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I feel like I could use an answer key after solving some of them levels. For instance... (after some spoiler space, so it'll get hidden by a "read more")

Level 7: It seems to involve dropping a letter from one end or the other, but then why doesn't DISCO become DISC?
Level 17: Clearly the vowel changes, but why STACK and not STUCK/STOCK? Why NUT and not NET? (Similarly for the three after it.)

Starting to get a little leery by level 22, where it feels like a guessing game. (Why SOFT and not EASY as the four-letter opposite of HARD? And POSSIBLE isn't particularly the opposite of FACTUAL; it's kind of the opposite of "definite", while "fictional" or "made-up" or otherwise definitely not true is the opposite of "factual".

In fact, currently stuck on level 23, where SEVER sure looks like it follows the rule of "synonym starting with S"...I really love the concept here, but the rules just aren't strict enough in some cases to know what the answer is. (Maybe it could use more hint options than "the first letter or the whole word"?)

Tahnan2 days ago(+1)

Sigh. Never mind. Pushed forward, in many cases by using the pen to fill in the answer, quitting the level, and going back into the level, which reset the pen hint. But Level 32 is literally broken: there's no way to input a number!

There's so much here that seems like a good idea, but if nothing else I feel like it's badly in need of playtesters who can say "this clue was clear; this one was too vague for me to get".

MikaelStudios2 days ago

Thanks for the feedback... I agree that some of the rules are not strict enough, and I will review them and get back to you on that in a few hours

MikaelStudios2 days ago

I have fixed level 32

Tahnan2 days ago(+2)

To be very honest: since I just discovered that it doesn't save progress, there's pretty much no way I'm going to go back through 32 levels just to get back where I was.

(Well, slightly more than that, because I did use the "reveal answer / quit / reenter" trick to get past 32. But things got more and more frustrating--the level where one answer was IDLE made no sense at all--and when I reached the point where it asked for an anagram of TRIANGLE, of which I should note there are four, and then you couldn't even put in the right answer because there were nine blanks for the eight-letter word....I'd had enough.)

Word puzzles are hard to write. I get that--I know that from experience; I've been solving, and writing, for decades. And the ideas here are good. But if you're not thorough, you're going to frustrate people instead of engaging them.

I strongly encourage you to find people to test the game. (Games in general, probably, but especially puzzles, are almost always harder than the creator thinks: the solution is obvious to you because you wrote it, but that only makes it hard to see what it looks like to other people. The only way through that is testing.)

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