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WordHopper

A stylish arcade word game for DOS (and more) · By kokoscript

Feature Wishlist

A topic by CattyNerd created Jul 21, 2023 Views: 84 Replies: 1
Viewing posts 1 to 2

I’m loving this game so far, but there’s a few things I’d like to see in future releases if possible. Note that these are all suggestions, and I don’t know what the final vision of this game is nor the limitations of the engine. I don’t expect all of these to make it into the game itself.

Customization:

  • Volume/mute settings
  • Ability to change colors (since the game only uses one color, plus black+white)
  • Mouse control option (Left click to move, right click to conform?)
  • Active toggles for different control styles
  • Expanding off the last point, the ability to rebind keys

Gameplay:

  • Bigger wordlist including some proper nouns (countries, continents, etc)
  • If not a bigger wordlist, a clarification of what kinds of words aren’t usable
  • A more intricate score system (More points for less-used letters, less points for repeated words, bonus points based on time) or potentially an explanation of the scoring system
  • A preview of how many points a word is worth (possibly in the corner)
  • Potential unlocks for reaching score thresholds or entering certain words (Color palettes, maybe new character sprites?)

Again, loving the game as it is so far. This is just a bunch of ideas I had while playing.

Developer

Thank you for the suggestions! A few things:

  • Volume settings are on the roadmap for the next update. Currently muting music/sfx can be done in the DOS version via `wordhopr setup` and setting the midi/sfx drivers to "NONE", but in the DOSBox builds this is tricky to get to so yeah, a proper in-game setting is needed
  • Mouse controls are, likewise, on the roadmap
  • Controlscheme toggles and custom highlight colors are definitely doable, I'll save them for the update after this next one
  • Key rebinding could be a bit tricky, but I'll see what I can do in the future.
  • I'd love to put in a bigger wordlist, but I'm up against the constraints of what can fit on a 1.44MB diskette. I still have some room left, but I'd prefer to save it for additional features unrelated to the wordlist. I could probably sneak in country and continent names though
  • The lack of an explanation of what words are valid/how scoring works stems from me wanting to keep the tutorial as short as possible, so I'll need to figure out a place to put some of that extra info. The DOS version comes with a readme which could be a good place to put it, but it's moreso designed for troubleshooting (and modern OS players won't be able to see it normally)
  • Word score preview is a huge oversight, I'll move that into the next update lol
  • Unlocks, not sure.

Overall, good stuff, I'll keep this all in mind for future updates!