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.
Tahnan
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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
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script.js:811:18
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Really hope this helps. (And it's not dampening my enjoyment of the game at all!)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.)
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!
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?
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 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.]
So: I haven't given up on this, but also I'll admit I'm more than a little stymied. (Obviously, since it's mid-January and I'm still working on it.) Can you confirm that the white arrow means (following in rot13 for spoilers)
ghea gur jbeq vagb nabgure jbeq va vgf pngrtbel, fb gung "gba" -> "cbhaq" (jrvtugf) naq "cbhaq" -> "rheb" (pheerapl
though if that's right, I don't know what's below "hear" (I'm assuming that "two parallel arrows" means "you can use this transformation in two different ways to get from A to B". Like, "read -> lead" could be connected with two arrows that mean "rhyme", because they rhyme as present-tense/opposite-of-follow and also as past-tense/metal-element.)
The problem I'm hitting is that there's no independent evidence for orange and blue, only for them together. I want, based on the above, for
gur fgrc orgjrra "gerr" naq "pbssrr" gb or "grn", jurer gur juvgr neebj vf gur pngrtbel fhofgvghgvba, naq gur benatr neebj vf...eulzvat? Ohg V qba'g xabj ubj gb genafsbez "erq" vagb fbzrguvat gung eulzrf jvgu "gerr". (Naq gura gur guvat orybj "gurr" jbhyqa'g or havdhryl qrgrezvarq; n ybg bs guvatf eulzr jvgu vg.)
Want to offer a nudge in the right direction?
Ooof. Opened the game in a private browser, to experiment with what kinds of connections it would draw now that I knew what it was. For "bacon" it told me Farm product, and for "skyscraper" it told me Hollow interior. That's kind of rough, because while straw is a farm product, and a drinking straw has a hollow interior, those are two different senses, which--if I didn't know the answer and was now trying to think of a farm product with a hollow interior--would very much throw me off.
(Hey, did you know a camel provides insulation and a horse is highly flammable? Thank heavens it's erring on the side of a property the target has and not a property the guess has. Though for "television" it offered accumulates dust which is kind of a terrible clue, since that's true for roughly any physical object. Also, do not trust this LLM with your horse.)
...yeahhh so it's true a nose ring is made of polished metal, but you don't polish it often. It's a frustratingly subtle distinction (and trying to read subtlety into AI answers will not go well).
In terms of it being a "vague clue": I went with "bread" as a guess even once I knew it was jewelry-related because I was hoping to triangulate somehow. That is, I wanted to get out of the local maximum where I'd guess another kind of jewelry and it would tell me "no, but here's what they have in common: jewelry!". Alas, it did not work very well.
Today I started with "wood" and was told it was a (five-letter) organic building material, so, well, that ended quickly. Still skeptical; still not unlikely to look again.
Definitely noticed the same thing GoodGuyGames did--part of the problem inherent in a guessing game that involves zeroing in on an answer is that your guesses start to get pretty similar ("necklace", "bracelet"...) and so the commonalities it finds are also pretty similar, which means you're not getting more information.
And while everything it gave me was associated with the answer, it wasn't always particularly associated with things I typed in. ("nosering": "Often polished"? Is it? "bread": "Frequently gifted"? I can't remember the last time someone offered me a gift-wrapped baguette.)
And GGG isn't wrong that it being an AI game makes it less appealing: not because I hate AI (which I do), but because it means that no thought has gone into any given day's game, because an AI cannot think. You clearly put thought into making the game, and kudos for that, but at the point at which an AI takes over, there's no guarantee any more that there will be a good path from the starting point to the solution, which is the kind of thoughtfulness that a game or puzzle designer will put into a round or level.
I might give it another go tomorrow, to see whether it exceeds my expectations. But I have to admit I'm not optimistic.
The Heaviest Objects in the Universe comments · Posted in The Heaviest Objects in the Universe comments
There's a lot here that makes no sense:
- Conveyor belts carry you one space, but there's nothing to indicate which direction.
- On almost all of the levels (well, through #9, which is when I lost interest), you can succeed by unfolding and just walking across. Like level 4 is called "carry lesson" and you can do it a move faster if you fold/carry, or you can just walk over to the blue square. Same thing on level 5, where it says that "the obvious route fails" but, no, you can obviously just go LLULUU.
- Level 6 tells you to "plan the landing", but (a) as noted in the first point you can't really plan anything and (b) there's nothing to plan, you just step onto the conveyor, which is your only move, and then walk to the blue square.
- Level 7 tells you there is no path. There is.
- Level 8 tells you to "time the fold". You just do it at the start and walk.
I feel like you're missing something fundamental here.
Clunky, yes, but kind of interesting! I can see things I'd improve (I made it to the second level before dying, which kind of undercut my original "it's kind of easy, isn't it?" comment), like possibly different-colored floors for adjacent rooms, specifically to help visually set apart multi-space rooms.
The "it seems easy" comment came from "oh just get the skeleton one space behind you and then it'll follow you but never reach you", which is great if it works, but it didn't particularly work by the time I got to the second level. I did get into a kind of stalemate, where I was in the fourth column and the skeleton was in the third, so I'd move up or down a row and it would move up or down a row to match me, so I was a move ahead of it but it blocked me every time. (Maybe I should look again with a little more attention to door-locking.)
But I think there's absolutely the core of an interesting game here.
This is intriguing! But there seems to be a restarting bug where, if I die (or, really, "when", because I'm dying a lot), my luggage starts with fewer empty slots--as if it remembers "I had two things in here, so I'm now at 3". (And then eventually at 0. It's very hard to succeed with zero luggage space.)
I think maybe it needs more thinking? I was given
Target touches Node 2. Target is 1 nodes from Node 3. Node 3 is EAST of Node 2.
and the target was Node 1, which is on the other side of Node 2 from Node 3, and thus very much not "1 nodes from" Node 3. Unless I'm very deeply misunderstanding how distance is being measured.