itch.io

Certainly I had fun shooting balls around the table and making red squares go boom.  But there are also mechanics I really didn't understand, like

• Why, once my damage-per-ball is high enough, do some squares die on the first hit, while others don't?  Do identical-looking squares have different health levels?
• Does my health just go down over time, or is something causing it that I should avoid?
• It doesn't look like anything is attacking/damaging me, so what is the "shield" upgrade for?
• "Prestige 1" seems to give $2 instead of $1 per enemy...but the enemies seem four times as hard to kill, which means there's no real incentive to play at that level.

It feels like there's a lot going on that could use more in-game explanation.

(Also, if you don't mind a couple of quality-of-life suggestions: it would be nice if there were a graphical distinction in the skill tree between things you can afford and things you can't.  And it might be nice to see what your current stats are--damage per hit, radius size, ball speed, etc.--so that things like "+1 durability" feel less abstract.  If an incremental game is all about Numbers Going Up, I want to see the numbers go up. :-) )

Reloading the page allowed me to continue.  Signal followed; circuit completed.  All the same, an eight lab analysis ought to result in no new information, or even be disallowed; a complete systems crash seems excessive.

I had analyzed seven artifacts in labs.  Analyzed an 8th.  Interface no longer responded; not certain whether interface faulty or something was listening.

Oh, I totally get that.  At some point I came across SCOWL, which was usefully separated into tiers based on how common the words were, but I don't know what its current status is.  You can also take a look at https://www.spreadthewordlist.com/, which is designed to be an open-source list; it's crossword-oriented, so there may be phrases in there, but it might still be a useful starting point (I think it's also a scored list, but I'm not sure).

Mostly I'm relieved to know that I wasn't being incredibly dense. :-)

I hear you about puzzle design though.  I love that game jams get people motivated; I hate that they encourage speed over thoroughness.  I hope you come back to this and tweak things, because it really is fun and clever.

Seems actively antagonistic to the player.  (Not just the precision timing; the delay in emerging from a purple teleport with a jump immediately after it, for example.  Or whatever the [expletive] level 5 is, where I made it into the second chimney but on top of everything else, jumping at the right time doesn't even always get you onto the next platform.)  I've been enjoying the releases and I kind of wanted to see what was going on here, but not badly enough.

Also the spacebar isn't working for jumping.

EDIT: against my better judgment, I right-clicked to open the frame in a new tab; the spacebar worked there.  Against my better judgment, I kept playing.  Ended six stars short, but I doubt I'll be returning to it, somehow...

...oh, I was really hoping the bug was "sure, have two adjacent dining rooms", because I cannot for the life of me find anything that follows the rules!

(There's only two places the bathroom can be, right?  If it's in the isolated room in the NE, then there's a bedroom next to it, and then living rooms on either side of it, kitchens on either side of those, and then there are still two rooms in the SW corner.  That's where I ended up putting two dining rooms.  The other option is in the  center-east room, but if you go clockwise and put down a bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen, then the dining room ends up in the center-west, with two rooms above it.  What am I missing?)

There are games with good puzzles that think they're funnier than they are.  And there are funny games that think their puzzles are better than they are.

This one is neither; it's a funny game with good puzzles. :-)  Really good work!

(There's a...I don't want to say "bug" on the last level, but it's a little weird that the restriction is that dining rooms can only be next to kitchens, but the final floor plan has two dining rooms adjacent to each other.)

> There might be words missing, if you find any contact me!

What word list are you using? If the "words missing" were obscure ones, I'd get it, but it looks like your list doesn't have "pigs", which falls into the "ultracommon" category.

ooooh, platformer!  That's interesting!  (Speaking as someone who isn't always great about stepping outside his creative comfort zone, such as it is.)

I did hit a bug while in the Tomb of the King, while trying to reach the secret that's visible from the entrance: I must have landed weirdly or moved too quickly, and now my frog is shapeshifting.  When I stand still it cycles through sign, diamond, fire, nothing; when I move, it cycles through gray disk, blue disk, key, slime; when I jump, it's arrow, and then I think something else but I land before I can tell.  (Restarting from the beginning fixes it, though, well, now I'm at the beginning...)

More engaging than I expected from the description!  (Not just a typing game, it turns out!)  But..."delete" to reset isn't working for me, so thanks to a misjudgment about slope, I've got a car flipped over near the A key and I can't seem to reset.

...or second, or third, or seventeenth...  This was your chance to say "oh no! I made an impossible level, I'm so sorry!", but no, instead I had to go solve it.  (Which I have.  Thank you for assuring me that I could.)

Neat!  Looking forward to seeing where else you go with this.

I've never seen this automaton before, and it's very cool.  But I'm very much stuck on the level labeled "Nice! Can you do it again?", where I've got this problem that only one of the four pieces even has a wire along its bottom edge, which makes it very hard to connect them.  You're sure that one's possible, right?

Clever!

The scrabble-like exploration of an overworld is a cool concept.  And clearly it held my attention, since I was 314 tiles in when I scrolled down to see the comments (at which point the game crashed).

I think it has promise!  There are the bugs (the crashing; the surrounded chest that still says "7/8"), possibly some QoL issues (I kept trying to fish when I was just a little too far onto an adjacent tile; sometimes the letter draws felt imbalanced), and of course it would be nice if the game had more to it (an exit to a next level? a store for spending fish?).  But it's a really solid core of a game.

Finally, finally got back around to this after stalling on it back in August.  Glad I did; it's very well done.  Excellent work on this.

The idea is indeed interesting.  The problem is that not all of the buttons showed up on the screen--I had a playthrough where it told me to press the red button, but there were only three buttons, none of them red.  (I'm currently looking at seven buttons, including a red one, though not a green one, which was also missing on a different playthrough that wanted me to press it.)  Needs a little work to make sure the buttons all appear.

The idea is interesting, but I ran out of time on the first day when I was about three pages into the guidebook.  I'm generally skeptical of timed games anyway, but there's at least got to be enough time to read the rules.

Oh, that was lovely.  Thank you.

Habit, really.  It's the thing in my browser history, the thing that comes up when I type "spell".

Though with the history lost (my axe was a little too broad), there's no real reason not to switch over, which I'll probably do for Thursday's.

Turns out stress is what I'm best at!  Yeah, no, clearly I play Too [Expletive] Many Games on this site and should restrict myself to the good ones, like this one.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to take an axe to my local storage...

1. Firefox 147.0.2, Windows.  I pretty much exclusively use typing.  No other actions taken after filling the last letter; "shuffle letters" and "drop single letters" predictably do nothing if I click them, since there are no letters left on top, though they do graphically indicate that they've been clicked.

2. It does work fine in incognito mode, even remembering that it's solved when I reload.  In non-incognito, though, Tuesday and Wednesday have actually gone back to being unsolved when I reload the page.  (This is consistent: just solved Tuesday again, no reaction; went forward to Wednesday and back to Tuesday, and got the Tuesday headline; reloaded the page, and Tuesday is again unsolved.)

3. Oh, the thing I never think to check!  So in fact, when I load the page, I get a "Uncaught DOMException: The quota has been exceeded." in the console; when I type in the last letter, I get it again.   Can't remember if there's a way to code-format things, so apologies for the following;

Uncaught DOMException: The quota has been exceeded.

    writeStats https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/15653463-1512013/script.js:811

    setStats https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/15653463-1512013/script.js:796

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    onThisWeekButton https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/15653463-1512013/script.js:380

    onclick https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/15653463-1512013/index.html?v=1770174965:1

script.js:811:18

    writeStats https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/15653463-1512013/script.js:811

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Is anyone else encountering an issue where they fill in all the letters (correctly) and the puzzle just stops instead of revealing the newspaper?  Weirdly, when I use the forward/back arrows at the top, it does show the solved-puzzle newspaper, but for a few days now it hasn't been coming up for me in solving.  (It could just be me.  I've done some terrible thing to my browser, I think, and it sometimes just refuses to work on pages that other people have no trouble with.  But this is new, so.)

I was previously unaware that I even could give an award for "Best Concept and Execution of a Game that I Have Ragequit and Will Never Play Again" and yet here we are!  This game is lovely and clever and well designed and I cannot possibly play it again.

...ok finally found it (I think I never did quite understand what the rule was for the Grey Block Birds).  Still love the games. :-)

OK, I was indeed able to continue and, in fact, finish.

(The "you've found everything in this region" is a great QoL improvement, BTW.)

The story is compelling, and the mechanisms generally solid.  There was some frustration in knowing information ("the Shaman is alone in the room at this time"; "Aisyah is at the secluded cove") but being unable to fill it in because the name or location hadn't yet been found.  (I possibly could have found the letter, and thus the location of the cove, much sooner, but that's neither here nor there, really.)  But overall, well worth playing through to the end.

Fascinated to see what comes next for you!

It's true that it's very simple, in terms of gameplay.  But I do like what you've done with the colors.

That was fascinating!  I'm kind of sorry that filing a final report ends the game--I mean, it was obvious it would, but I was hoping I'd get to keep piecing things together afterwards, because I was definitely missing some things.  (A lot of things?  What Cynthia was even up to?  Who the unnamed shaman was?)

There were a few things that felt like guesswork--I felt like I was clicking on every square in every location and trying to focus on objects to see if they were there and would open up something else.  (But the ability to trace objects, and by that to get new partial dialogue, was very cool.)  Intrigued to see Delphine return!

This is now driving me crazy.  Love the games, finished Frogwell, and now I have 81/84 birds and I know which three I'm missing because it's the one in the very lower left, the one you reveal with the book I can't reach because of the very lower left, and the yellow bird that you can't get near because of the very lower left.

The very lower left, is what I'm saying.  Cannot for the life of me figure out how to wake it up.  Whatever am I missing?

In rot13: Va gur unyyjnl orsber lbh ernpu gur xavtug, gurer'f n cnary ng gur gbc bs gur jnyy ba gur evtug.  (Juvpu V sbhaq orsber V sbhaq gur bar ol gur fabjsynxr, naq pbhyqa'g svther bhg jul vg qvqa'g jbex ba gur dhrra'f oernfgcyngr...)

wordfreq, if it's a thing you can use, definitely has information for French, Spanish, and German.  (If you don't use Python, the data files are available in MessagePack format at https://github.com/rspeer/wordfreq/tree/master/wordfreq/data, which ought to be readable in the programming language of your choice.)

I know Elia, who wrote wordfreq, used wiktionary dumps for other projects, and I know there's useful data in there (I think among other things she was filtering out offensive words?), but I don't know much about it.  Best of luck!

To be fair, "my personally curated word list" is the kind of thing a lot of crossword puzzle creators keep closely guarded, because it's hard to decide what words should or shouldn't "count", especially if you're planning to go through them one by one.

In theory, https://www.spreadthewordlist.com/ could help; it's an open-source curated word list.  Since it's crossword focused, though, it probably does include things you'd accept as a crossword entry but not as a word in a puzzle that, like this one, doesn't use clues.  (For instance, phrases like "UM NO", or uncommon proper names like "ELIA", which are things that you can write a clue for.)  Also of course it's only in English.

Also potentially helpful, if you're a Pythonista, is the "wordfreq" package (https://github.com/rspeer/wordfreq), which lets you look up the frequency of words.  If you have a too-long word list, it might be able to tell you that "vrot" and "caas" are rarer than you want your words to be.  (Also has the advantage that it's hugely multilingual!)

Anyway--I'm leaving any comment at all because I love word games, and I love seeing more of them, and so I'm happy that you made this at all and would love to see it be as good as it can be!  Keep up the good work!

It's an interesting idea, but you should think about wordlists--the problem with using everything in Wiktionary is that not everything in Wiktionary is exactly a word.  In the game I just played I had both JUDS (the plural of "A mass of coal holed or undercut so as to be thrown down by wedges.", which is...not a word most people will ever use, or see) and FANE (which is a surname).

This is a really excellent example of its genre: you've done a great job of taking all the information needed and spreading it around across various signs, cards, scripts...I really enjoyed it.

But--the lamp didn't want anything next to it, and in your image, it's next to the well.  Does the well not count somehow?  (That's a thing that I think could be made a lot clearer, if so.)

The only problem with a lack of rewarding screen is that I can't tell if I hit the end of the existing squares, or if I'm getting it wrong.  (Is there at least something that indicates the end of a path?  If so, I was doing something wrong.)

This is lovely--quiet, calm, easy controls, small enough to not be overwhelming.

I did, though, get a grid that I can't figure out how to solve.  (Are they hand-generated or auto-generated?)  There's a well in a corner; a stage that doesn't want to be next to anything; a lamp that doesn't want a tile next to it and doesn't want to be in a corner; a gate that wants a tile around it; a pavilion that doesn't want a tile in its corners; and four grass.

As far as I can tell, the lamp has to be a knight's move away from the well (it can't be in a corner, or next to it, and if it's in the center there's nowhere to put the stage); the stage has to be in the other corner a knight's move away from the lamp (so that it's not next to anything); and now the lamp needs three empty spaces around it, and the stage needs two more (the center space that the lamp already accounts for, and the two next to it); and that's five grass needed but only four available.

Am I missing something?  Is there a bug somewhere?

Wow, that sure is an ugly prototype! :-)

No, seriously though, very cool to prototype the game to get a sense of its gameplay first. I think it's a neat concept: on the first round I was like "uhh...so I roll dice?", but by the second I was considering the dice and the cards and thinking "this isn't trivial, is it".

I ended up six coins short on the fifth round, which isn't a bad showing, all things considered.  I did feel a certain lack of control; the rule "larger divided by smaller" felt particularly hard to manage, since even with a d20 (do they go larger?) and a d6 (do they go smaller?), the expected payoff is pretty small.  (4.5ish, depending on how you round, with better than a 50% chance of getting three coins or less.)

But it's intriguing!  I'd love to see where it goes.
 

OK, bugs notwithstanding, I'm enjoying the heck out of this.  I love the presentation so much.

But speaking of bugs...

• After adding a second definition to a word, you can only click on its first letter to open it from the Dictionary.  (Which is better than I thought, i.e. that you couldn't click it at all.)
• I seem to have lost my Lielow board. [EDIT: never mind, there it is, totally forgot where I found it.]