Word Ways - A fresh new Word Game!

Community Showcases
1

The game is now out on Google Play!

Download it here for free!
http://bit.ly/wordways_android

We also have a preview video that you can check out.

You can also read below and follow up on the progress that the game has gone through. So, stay in touch as I’ll be posting new gameplay videos, images, write ups on our experiences developing the game and even a time lapse recording of most of the development of the game.

I’d also love to hear your feedback and comments. Either follow us on Twitter or Facebook and let us know how we’re doing, thanks!

Cheers!

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Hey Everyone!

I’ve been neck deep in organizing my projects and since some things move faster than others, I decided to embark on a little adventure on my own as things build momentum. Basically, the idea is to create a small project that I can focus on making it as fun as possible, release relatively early with some good things built into it and develop from there.

So, I started creating a Word game. I have some pretty big ideas for what I’ll be doing here, but I figured I’d start by sharing a little bit about what I got so far. I will be blogging about it here to keep it up to date, and sharing some of this stuff over at the Collective Entertainment website.

Since I purchased the 2d Toolkit package last night (to handle text and a few things easily) I went to town on it. I got a basic user interface based on a sample project where you can press letters to type out words.

I built in logic to score all the buttons/letters as well as do a distribution of the alphabet based on Scrabble 100-letter rules in order to generate words.

The game right now:

  • Creates a word distribution, scrambles it, and creates a single “board”
  • Users can click through the buttons, recording order of presses and displays the word up on the screen.
  • Grey buttons = non clicked
  • Red buttons = must be part of the word
  • Green buttons = buttons that have been clicked
  • Users can click on any previously pressed button and have the order regress, clearing it up so you can keep going from there.
  • Once you press “Accept” it records the word and resets the board.
  • The white trail behind the letters is a trail of lines so you can see the order in which you have typed them (something similar to how Android handles entering the password)

Outside of the game I’m currently doing the following:

  • Creating some python scripts to help me go through the dictionary, organize all of the words in there, scoring them, and adding a lot of data that I want to make sure exists so that I don’t have to deal with it in the game.
  • Currently the python script goes through the TWL06 dictionary and the SOWPODS dictionary and makes sure that they co-exist in the same space. Later on, I could simply add more dictionaries and flatten them down.

So, why am I writing python scripts for the dictionaries?

  • I don’t want to do what a lot of other games do where they simply take words and letters and shove it in front of the player.
  • This will lead me to be able to deal with the words in a variety of ways that will be needed to create the gameplay in a way that it’s a bit more directed.
  • I want to parse the dictionaries to score words based on number of letters, complexity of word due to type of letters, number of available anagrams derived from the word, popularity of the word in terms of probability of it existing, definition, etc…
  • I’ll probably be organizing all of this data to be sitting inside of a single JSON file that I’ll be reading back into Unity. I’d like to keep all of the contextual data residing with each word. I’m not sure how bloated some of these files might get. I definitely want to keep the game under 20mb so anyone can download it (especially since I’m going to be making it free).

More to come soon!

2

Alright, so I worked a bunch more on this yesterday and today.

  • I started doing a bunch of anagram related work in order to organize the word database a bit more but I’m going to set that aside for a bit.

I wanted to get the dictionary up and running in the game and so I did. I searched the internet a bit and found a nice little file loader/reader so I could get the word entries in the game.

private void LoadWordDictionary() {
	_wordDictionary = new Dictionary<string,WordEntry>();
        FileInfo theSourceFile = new FileInfo ("Assets/Files/finalDictionary.txt");
        StreamReader reader = theSourceFile.OpenText();
	string line;
		
	while ((line = reader.ReadLine()) != null)  {
		string []adjustedWords = line.Split(new char[] {'\n'});
		if( adjustedWords[0] != "" ) {
		WordEntry newWord = new WordEntry(adjustedWords[0], GetLetterPointValue( adjustedWords[0] ), adjustedWords[0].Length );
		_wordDictionary.Add( newWord._word, newWord );
		}
	}
}

I then went and did a bit of logic to deal with the scoring of the game so I could see it picking up on correct answers and displaying them up on screen.

I had some ideas for how I want the gameplay to be presented so I’m going to organize that a bit. I want to have a bit of an interesting presentation from the beginning in order to create some visual communication in the gameplay. I’ll be animating the letter blocks in some ways to tell you whether you got a letter wrong, right, and whether you did very well at it.

More coming soon!

3

So, I did some more work on the game last night and this morning.

Basically, I wanted to add some visual language that also translate into some gameplay constraints to the player. The way that I’m going about this is by creating geometrical shapes that conform to different arrangements that the player must interact with when forming words.

Here are some examples of what I mean. I currently created 5 different arrangements: square, rectangle, diamond, pyramid and cross. These will force players to interact with the shapes in specific way.

I’m currently breaking up the dictionary to be able to better provide a more directed gameplay experience that match these different shapes.

Project Name: Wordometry.

In this example, the player got 4 letter across in a row, rewarding him a bonus.

While here, the player completed a 3 letter geometrical edge, providing him with another bonus

I got a ton of stuff down on paper, I’ll be continuing on developing the gameplay further and creating the experience. I got some interesting plans for this one.

4

I went over the game a bit more now and organized the game boards to be initialized using words that fit the game board.

I still haven’t worked on the visualization aspects of it (which I want to). For now, I’m thinking that I’d like to release the game with a few different visual presentations. I’ll look at art at a later date (and probably find someone to help out).

I started writing down a bunch of gameplay rules and constraints so I can mess around with them. I’m going to try to implement this in a way that users can fiddle with them easily (image Bomberman) so I can do some A/B testing to figure out what people like most. Since I got UIToolkit, I want to try developing a simple interface so users can set the rules in a game and play a round. I want to be able to iterate on this aspect efficiently.

I gotta work on another project now to start knocking down some work on it. I’ll get back to this one very soon.

5

Here is an example of a 9 letter board (Square) with the word “Deception” having been chosen to distribute it’s letters across this board.

I’m going to try playing with various aspects of how the game works to promote being good with words as well as creative with the words that you choose to create (perhaps no one cares cause it’s a word game, but I’m keeping it vague here for a reason =P).

6

Ok I know this is only slightly relevant BUT what other opportunity will I ever have to use this?!


Game looks good btw. Dont quite understand the concept though. Do you simply have to build the words using the letters? As fast as possible?

7

Hey Stefano,

I haven’t really seen this concept in action anywhere other than a very basic paper word game called Polygon which I’m using as a bit of a model for building the rules of my game. I’ve played a ton of typing and word games in the past, including the quite popular Typing of the Dead. However, I’m hoping to focus more on networked, player experience, including versus as well as co-op.

I’m going to be building the game so that you’re always being posed against challenges, whether against an opponent, time, number of moves, and perhaps even co-op goals. I’ve written down about 5-10 basic set of rules (that can be active) that I want the game to be based around. This will mix the gameplay between you having to create words quickly, creating words strategically (using the board) and just creating big words.

The idea is to have 2 boards that you’re consistently interacting with.

1 - Word Board Area (not yet created)
[2x][slow]

2 - Wordometry Area




The word board area will sit on the top and look like a single line of Scrabble, with several elements all over the board such as 2x word, 2x letter, slowdown, extra s’s, etc…

[2x][slow]

As you pick letters from the Wordometry Area, they are entered into the Word Board Area, forming the words and gaining you bonuses from the board. As you create bigger words, the Wordometry Area will award you for using connected letters (let’s say an 3 letter edge in the cube) as well as performing well in other ways. As you consume bonus pieces in the Word Board Area, various gameplay-related outcomes will happen.

I want to focus a LOT of the variety of gameplay rules, scoring and objectives to provide a wide range of gameplay choices to players.

I’m still proving the concept, I have to make sure that the gameplay is easy to understand, intuitive and fun. If I can make that happen, I’ll probably releasing it for free as soon as I have something that is market-ready.

8

Was working all day/night on our Facebook project. Had a couple of hours to work on this today so I put my initial rules down and got the main rule-setting menu in place so I can go through all of the implementations and tweak them. More on this later as I get everything functional.

9

So, I did some more work in the game today to develop the Survival gameplay mode. I narrowed down a way to implement the mechanics that I think will work. However for me to do this in a way that made sense, I had to adjust the visuals to help make sense of things… So, I took the liberty of “borrowIng” some graphics from a popular game. Due to this, I will refrain from posting current progress.

Either that, or I will post progress once I have this whole thing up and running so it behaves and a bit more like how it should.

Let’s just say that working on implementing the rules helped out tremendously in fleshing out the way that the gameplay is structured. Now, I need to see if it will work.

10

So, I did a bunch of work to get some of the mechanics in place for how this is all going to work. Here is a video of it on youtube.

It’s still quite early on, but you can see how entering words into the Wordometry board causes the score board to react. Based on what the wordometry board presents you with, you’ll active the scoring board in unique/different ways. Lots and lots of plans. I should have a lot of the pickups and scoring in place as well as the level progression up pretty soon (lots of it designed/stubbed/coded, just not all hooked up).

11

Uuuuuhhh, I reallly love the improvement of the graphics quality. Superbe job on that.
Was a bit sceptical because of the inital unity drafts, but boy does it shine now !
Wonderful to see this project developing like that :slight_smile:
Great work !!

12

Hahahah, yeah, I thought it was a bit too early to “showcase” anything, but I also thought it might be interesting to start writing some stuff from earlier on.

I took the liberty of grabbing the sprites from Word with Friends to deal with the basics and get things laid out. I’m trying to design the game to be somewhat modular about art requirements so we can be efficient developing the presentation of the game. I got some good ideas for how I’d like to go about doing this, hopefully I’ll be getting an artist friend of mine involved pretty soon.

More to come!

13

Very nice! Simple concept but clearly thought out, smartly planned, and well-developed gameplay. Looks like pick-up-and-play, casual fun, and a modest design that’s clearly achievable with your current resources. A lot of people around here could learn a thing or two from this thread. They probably won’t, but they could.

Keep up the good work, and keep us updated!

14

haha, oke.
Guess I shall wander around games to recognize used sprites :wink:
Nevertheless, looks really cool.

If you don’t find an artist friend, let me know :stuck_out_tongue:
Would love to get my hands dirty on a words game.

15

Thanks a ton Gopher!

For me the formula is simple. Increase your development constraints and rely on your creativity to solve problems. If you’re taking on a lot more than you can handle, not only will your project suffer, but you’re putting it at risk of never going anywhere.

I’ll take that as flattery Acumen. From being skeptical to “On Board!”, hopefully the game will turn out well and others will feel similarly. =)

16

With about 1 month into the project now (it has become my main project), I’m not ready to announce many things but let’s just say that the game has gotten a brand new look.

I’m going pretty hard with this project so expect a lot of good news in the near future!

17

Hey guys, how’s it going?

I fell off the face of the Earth and hit face first on our word game. So, I’ve been busy but will be starting to talk a lot more about the game. It still has a ways to go but we’re hoping to release a version of the game in the near future.

I’ll hopefully remedy this by adding more content here and telling everyone a bit more about what we’re up to.

Although much better, this is what the game was looking like in December. We’ve since updated the art again since we felt that was a bit too familiar to another word game that currently exists.

18

Alright guys, I’m super busy today, but tomorrow I’m gonna start talking a bit more about the game and the development of it. I’ve been time lapsing the whole development of the game and I have quite a bit of images, footage and builds to hopefully put something together in the near future.

All I know is that there will be an art overhaul of the game in the next week or so which by then, I’ll be showing plenty more as we push hard towards getting a release lined up.

Random SS of the game + Captioning:

The screenshot below shows the general setup of what a gameplay board is like in the editor. This was one of the approaches that I tried in order to communicate how the bonuses work in the game. As users tapped each letter, bonus lines would emerge from behind them.

19

Hey guys, how’s it going?

Been feeling pretty good about the way that the game is shaping up but I’ve been extremely tired to do anything else but work. My brain is basically in “get the game done” mode.

I’ve had to take a lot of the time lately to work on the presentation of the game. Having come from a AAA console background, I want to make sure that all of my games have a cohesive theme. So, I had to work extra hard to get the menus, screens, buttons and everything organized in a direction that my artist will be able to do the rest.

We’ve done some iterations on the general look of the game, and wanted to show you guys how the game has been looking like for a bit. Here is a more recent screenshot of the game in place.

Keep your eyes peeled, we got a lot to say, just not enough energy to write it down in an organized, cohesive manner.

20

Hmm, I should really be updating this a lot more…

Here are some more recent pictures. Also, if anyone is interested in doing a little beta test, the game is pretty close to being released and the more devices this game runs on, the merrier.

I’ve tested it on a couple of phones, a galaxy tab, a kindle fire and a nook device, everything seems functional. I’ve only been able to run as low as Android 2.3.4, (mostly because I’ve been testing more across devices).

If you got an android device, and you wanna try a new word game, let me know.