OMG Words
Roguelike Word Game Demo: play tiles, make words and cash.
Spend your money on relics and boons to upgrade your run and give you crazy combos and massive points.
Feedback hugely appreciated:
Should I turn this into a full game?
What would you like to see added?
Development log
- Bug Fixes and Quality of Life ImprovementsJan 14, 2024
Comments
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First impressions: There are many ways to increase score but not multiplier, and this seems to become a bottleneck. A smallish board and only 4 turns by default means you don't usually get to build up much or set up hooks etc. for bigger plays. When I upgraded random spaces on the board they were on the outer perimeter, which doesn't help much with only 4 turns.
The current format is a score chaser with a rising target a la Luck Be A Landlord, but personally I would prefer a bag-builder with a journey toward a defined end (i.e. not just survive as long as you can). I also think there's room for more interesting abilities than just xyz ways of increasing word score for what you use in the word. More control over what you draw, duplicating a rack tile or making it wild, removing tiles from the board, ignoring bad adjacencies (i.e. inter-space walls), stuff like that. There could also be different characters with cooldown abilities that could be upgraded or tech-treed over the course of a run.
Starting with a basic set of letters and buying more specialized tiles as you progress would also be more interesting to me- not just for different letter distributions per game, but also accruing tiles that have effects and aren't just letters.
Overall I enjoyed my first play and see lots of potential in the idea, but I'm not sure how long the current demo will hold my interest.
Edit: Also, since this essentially mimics Scrabble placement rules, something to keep in mind is that it's currently susceptible to the same sort of min-maxing by e.g. abusing two-letter combinations and rare words, so there's perhaps an open question of how much you want to incentivize that should you develop the game into something bigger.
Thanks for the feedback here a lot of this stuff are things I know I need to build out in a fuller version. I want to encourage other strategies including bag building and board building. As for the score chaser that was just easiest thing to implement for this demo final version the plan is to have a league system where each run is defined set of matches with a boss at the end, and each challenge gives different board/item pool/opponents to encourage more variety of play.
If your interested in following progress, have more suggestions or would like to try out the next beta when I release it please join the discord here: https://discord.gg/QBWjU8kDzd
Just for reference, posting the results of my second game, which went a bit better:
Found a neat bug: if you use all the tiles in the bag, when the game tries to draw another one, the game soft-locks
This game is great too, love to see more good word games. Got introduced to it by The-Balthazar in the bookworm discord :P
I will make a note of that for the next version, I was never able to do anything that impressive in my testing so it didn't come up :)
I introduced the Bookworm Adventures speedrunning discord to this, and this was one of their results:
Lmao I improved the score. 16 wins is probably barely possible, but requires insane luck and skill.
That's the highest score I have ever seen, you should post it on the discord here; https://discord.com/invite/8JHKkBNY to see if other people can beat it