This is a super cool concept! This is a very powerful mechanic that offers a lot of replayability and interesting scenarios for the player to naturally encounter. My main issue with the game as it is though is the balance. The variance in what enemies you're given and how many of theme there are means you can pretty easily be put into a no-win scenario. One that I ran into quite a lot was getting a large number, like 7-9. Since every letter you type causes enemies to advance one space, and there's only 10 tiles on the board, typing a 9-letter word without clearing the entire board guarantees you're taking damage. Then even if you've gotten the 9-letter word done safely, you've now given the enemies 9 chances to spawn, which can easily leave you with at least 10 more. It feels nearly impossible to keep up with the enemies given how quickly they spawn and how random the letters they give you are (vowels don't feel like they show up especially often even though every word needs at least one). This was probably the intention, to avoid the game going on forever, but it felt especially punishing. Maybe enemies could advance once per word, plus one for every 2 letters to make long words less punishing and give more of a chance to clear the field? As long as 1 letter = 1 enemy move, I don't know how you could realistically prevent enemies from overwhelming you without killing at least 1 enemy with every letter. That being said, I think your issues are very fixable, and if/when they do get fixed, I think this game will be amazing!
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What a detailed and thoughtful comment! You are very much correct that the balance needs work; the enemy spawning was done in the last 2 hours so I cut some corners and did not have time to balance haha. My original vision if I had time was to have the larger numbers be something like 5+ so there's room for different choices. First thing I would do for a patch is definitely to cut the amount of 7-8-9 and X-Y-Z. Thanks again for enjoying the game!