[HN Gopher] Show HN: Truncate, a word-based strategy game
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Show HN: Truncate, a word-based strategy game
Truncate is a chess flavoured word game that blends spatial
reasoning and wordplay. In puzzle mode, you beat back your NPC
opponent's words and take over their territory. Truncate started
as a pen and paper game between a friend and I, evolved into a
handmade board game, and finally arrived at an online puzzle game.
Like any good word game, there is of course a daily mode, shareable
with the tried and true grid of emojis We've been playtesting it
with friends and family for a few months, which has helped iron out
the tutorials and gameplay, and we're finally happy with an MVP
worth sharing! Technical deets: The client and server are written
in Rust, with the visuals built using egui (as an experiment in
Rust's GUI ecosystem). We'd love any feedback!
Author : liambigelow
Score : 133 points
Date : 2024-03-31 09:58 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (truncate.town)
(TXT) w3m dump (truncate.town)
| liambigelow wrote:
| Forgot to mention -- it's fully open source at
| https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate for anyone who likes
| poking their digital nose around :)
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Can you include text instructions of how to play the game
| instead of only having an interactive tutorial? I find the slow
| scroll speed and interactive nature doesn't work as well for me
| as being able to scan a document.
|
| If I forget a specific point it's frustrating to have to go
| through the whole tutorial again.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Congratulations on the game, and thanks for choosing to share
| the source!
|
| It would help if it had a license file in the repo in order to
| express what rights you grant to others
| liambigelow wrote:
| Oh good note thanks, my mistake. It should be MIT, I'll add
| the license today.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Nitpicking: in the "learn to play" tutorial, in the step to add
| an e in _nough and _ex versus four, the blue tiles are
| disconected that is an invalid position. Perhaps you can add a
| tile somewhere in the middle to conect them.
| liambigelow wrote:
| aha they totally are, that's more than a nitpick! Will fix,
| thanks for pointing that out.
| akirathedev wrote:
| Congrats on the MVP launch! Love the game, it's awesome!
| captn3m0 wrote:
| This breaks in lockdown mode on iOS.
| liambigelow wrote:
| Darn. I do believe lockdown mode fully disables WebAssembly, so
| that makes sense. I don't think there are any significant
| roadblocks to packaging the game as a native app, so that might
| be a good push to do so.
| FrancoisBosun wrote:
| I enjoyed my game. I had some difficulty playing due to the board
| not being very wide: many nooks and crannies. In the dictionary,
| search for << ti >> and notice the invalid character in <<
| solfage >>. Congrats!
| liambigelow wrote:
| Thank you! Yes, for the puzzles we would up having to constrain
| the board to a size that wasn't too egregious when sharing
| emojis... The classic single player has a bit more room to
| breathe :)
|
| (Thanks for pointing out the font -- I do have an issue for
| that (https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate/issues/111) so
| it's nice to get validation on its importance)
| dwighttk wrote:
| It isn't really my kinda game but it looks like it could be
| really good
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| This is super cool. My main feedback at this point is about the
| dictionary. I'd have it be open on the side so I can see the
| board and use it at the same time. Or, as a half-step, have a
| shortcut to open it and have ESC close it. Although personally
| I'd prefer the former.
|
| But congrats on this, it's awesome!
| card_zero wrote:
| Maybe putting down a tile should open the dictionary and look
| up the words formed, instead of the player having to type them
| in, and then there should be buttons for "make this move" and
| "make a different move instead".
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| I think this might take away a bit from the "strategy" of the
| game. Or not so much strategy but the mental fog that plays a
| role in blunders and the like - the same as how it's harder
| to get a grasp on your opponent's words at a glance because
| they're flipped. Just my 2c
| card_zero wrote:
| You think it might make life too easy? But it's similar in
| some Sid Meier games where you can see the outcome of a
| battle (or the odds) before committing. Besides which, the
| dictionary is patchy and unpredictable, so I use it on most
| moves anyway, to strategize around its arbitrary subset of
| English.
| liambigelow wrote:
| Good notes on both fronts, so thanks!
|
| We have been on the fence about this (and still are!).
| One option is to add this kind of UI in a "tutor" mode
| that starts on, and can be opt-out at some point. Not
| sold on it yet, but mulling it over.
| sanderjd wrote:
| You're probably reading this whole thread, but in case
| you didn't see an idea I had elsewhere: I like the "tutor
| mode" idea, and think it would be nice for it to
| highlight all the currently-valid words (maybe toggle-
| able).
| liambigelow wrote:
| Thanks! Great notes
| nathancahill wrote:
| Definitely a shortcut to open it, with focus on the search
| field and escape to close it. Ideally above or below the board
| so it doesn't block the screen.
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| Ah yeah sorry I wrote "be open" but I meant "open" as in it
| isn't constantly open but opens without hiding the board
| card_zero wrote:
| The dictionary isn't very good.
|
| * Doesn't include useful but rare short words, such as _el_
|
| * Does include obscure or slang words such as _stere_ and _jones_
|
| * But doesn't include their conjugations. I lost due to making
| _steres_ without checking to see if the game knows the plural (it
| doesn 't).
| liambigelow wrote:
| Thanks for the examples, I'll note them. We did intentionally
| scale back from the classic wordgame dictionaries (looking at
| you, Scrabble) due to an overabundance of archaic words that
| the NPC can play against you -- but it does push us into the
| unfortunate role of dictionary moderators!
|
| I'd like to add a button to the dictionary to report words that
| should be included. For now, we erred on the side of a smaller
| dictionary since it's less jarring to add words than remove
| them :)
|
| (stere / steres is especially regrettable, sorry!)
| card_zero wrote:
| _El_ is just the name of L, yet it 's cheaty due to how
| little use it gets.
|
| Obtaining a good word list is hard, I have one saved which is
| a merging and editing of several freely available ones,
| including one used in Scrabble competitions and one from some
| Linux distro, and a few "basic word lists". There will be
| _endless_ errors like missing plurals and past tenses, as
| well as the inclusion of things like acronyms that shouldn 't
| be in there at all. And if you prune obscure words but allow
| the submission of missing words, I guess you'd better keep
| the list of pruned words around so you can head people off at
| the pass by pre-filtering their submissions.
| liambigelow wrote:
| Our current base list is the intersection of Wordnik's
| games wordlist and the SCOWL spellchecker -- words in both
| are a definite yes, and SCOWL's capitalization helps us
| filter out acronyms and proper nouns.
|
| We have done some manual massaging beyond that, but not
| much. Waiting for more feedback like this! You can see the
| current tranches of dictionary massaging here: https://gith
| ub.com/TruncateGame/Truncate/tree/main/dict_buil...
| sanderjd wrote:
| This seems to cry out for a separate project to try to
| standardize a "wordlist for word puzzle games that
| doesn't mostly cater to scrabble pedants" :)
|
| One thing that might help would be for the winning word,
| and all the other words involved, to be shown somewhere
| upon a battle's resolution, along with their definition
| (or lack thereof).
| card_zero wrote:
| That exists, it's under the [i] button at the top right.
|
| Incidentally, some buttons don't work for me. This [i]
| button won't toggle back to off, and the buttons in the
| "edit board" function mostly don't work - including "stop
| editing board".
| xpe wrote:
| Rule question: In the tutorial, on the "Combatants" screen:
|
| > Only words touching another player's words are involved in a
| battle. This means you can win battles even though your board
| contains invalid words.
|
| > Try playing playing "TO" against your opponent's "FT".
|
| > Even though your board is mostly valid, the only words involved
| in the battle were "TO" and "FT", so you won and "FT" was removed
| from the board.
|
| This doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me that "TO" should
| only battle the opponent's "F" because the opponent has "TOUR"
| adjacent to "F".
|
| If my interpretation was right, only "F" should have been
| removed.
| liambigelow wrote:
| In battles, weak words compromise all of their letters. "TOUR"
| would be safe, but the "FT" ruins the "T" by making it part of
| an invalid word -- and an invalid word that loses is removed in
| its entirety.
|
| Thanks for pointing it out! It's something we have had come up
| before, and the sort of thing we keep iterating the tutorial
| toward explaining better, so we'll take another crack at it!
| xpe wrote:
| Thanks for your reply. In your meaning, a 'word' is just a
| contiguous string of letters in one direction... So in this
| way a 'word' can be invalid or valid.
|
| But (pedantic note) it is a little more specific than that.
| It includes ALL letters until the edge of the board or space
| on the board. Right?
|
| Do most people consider an invalid word to be a kind of word?
| I don't think I do, and I think this was the source of my
| confusion. But I'm not a word-game person per se nor Scrabble
| expert... this might be obvious to other people.
| liambigelow wrote:
| Interesting! This might be our Scrabble bias showing
| through. Yes, when we say "word" I suppose we're meaning
| "something that a player has claimed to be a word" by
| placing contiguous tiles. I'll look at somewhere to clarify
| language in the tutorial.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Very interesting thread! As computer people, I suspect
| "string" would make sense to encompass both "sequence of
| letters" and (valid) "word". But that wouldn't work for
| most people. Maybe just "sequence"... Or maybe just stick
| with "word" but add this caveat to the tutorial, like you
| were thinking :)
| Kwpolska wrote:
| I went through the tutorial and it feels like a complicated game.
| The battle rules feel very complex and hard to remember.
| xpe wrote:
| I'm just a new player: yeah, I get that. I personally like the
| rule set, but it would be nice if they could be neatly
| summarized.
|
| Something around this might be a starting point to summarize
| the battle rules: to win, a player's attacking letter requires
| two things. (1) All of the attacker's touching words to be
| valid; (2) At least one attacking word to be 2 letters longer
| than one of the defender's valid words. (But I don't this is
| all of it. It probably needs revision.)
|
| Aside: I'm not sure what the _minimum_ level of complexity for
| the rules _could_ be. I get the impression these rules were
| chosen to make the game more interesting. Having known some
| game-creators, it is common for game rules to be play tested.
| But there is always the question of "play tested for what
| audience?"
|
| P.S. I like the game so far. A lot. I see a lot of potential in
| it, but yeah, it is significantly more complex than Scrabble.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yep, I suspect the "win by _2_ letters " thing is a play-
| tested thing. Simpler would just be "the attacker needs one
| more letter". But I suspect +2 results in a more fun game, at
| the cost of being slightly harder to learn the game and
| reason out the results of each battle.
|
| Aside: For instance, +1 is the defender's advantage in Risk,
| and I always loved the mechanics added by the Lord of the
| Rings version (and maybe other versions) where you could
| modify that advantage to anything from +0 (with a "leader" in
| the attacking army), to +3 (with a leader in a defending army
| on a tile with a "stronghold"). This is a bit different
| because it isn't dice rolls, but a similar idea.
| mbrain wrote:
| I gave up in the middle of the tutorial.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Agreed, but in a _good_ way. Some games are brilliant via
| simplicity, others are brilliant via more complex but elegantly
| interlocking rules.
| xpe wrote:
| Warning: if you don't know Scrabble words you will be utterly
| destroyed. For example "REC" is valid: "An abbreviation for
| recreation". What the f-? HAHA
| card_zero wrote:
| The npc just won a battle with the word _st,_ defined as
| "expressing a sudden desire for silence".
|
| Hmm, that's apparently sourced from Wiktionary. Wiktionary is
| great, but has a very broad concept of "word".
| liambigelow wrote:
| We source the definitions from Wiktionary, but have a much
| higher bar for words to count as valid in the game. ST comes
| up often, as I agree it's one of the iffier words, but even
| Cambridge claims to to be so:
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/st
| card_zero wrote:
| That page only defines it as an abbreviation (for _saint,
| short ton, street,_ or _stone_ ).
| liambigelow wrote:
| Ah, 2am reading comprehension on my part. Yes, if we ever
| remove rather than add to the dictionary in the future I
| might look to axe it.
| wigster wrote:
| i beat AN with FEN to win - i was expecting to lose due to
| defender +2 bonus.
| liambigelow wrote:
| Oh! Yes, this is an interesting case. Towns actually slot into
| the battle as one-letter words, so this case FEN is long
| enough. It doesn't come up much, but it might deserve
| elaboration in an "advanced" tutorial since it's unexpected.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Or have you considered not having towns work that way? Seems
| like a confusing caveat to me, unless there is a good reason
| for it.
| octopusRex wrote:
| Kudos for creating the game. Reading upside down is difficult. In
| Scrabble you could turn the board around to face you when it was
| your turn.
|
| Why did my opponent place qxa to begin with?
|
| I tried to get through the tutorial , but could not. Maybe
| simplify the rules or simplify the game before I'd play, but
| others may enjoy.
|
| I do play wordle and other NYTimes word games , and scrabble, so
| I'm not averse to those types of games.
|
| Maybe I should have had a cup of coffee first. I will try again
| later.
|
| But still hats off for creating it. Congratulations.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Counterpoint: I found the tutorial great for teaching a game
| that is not super simple, in a _good_ way. I think it would be
| a mistake to simplify the rules in order to simplify the
| learning process. I think the rules are elegant, just not
| straightforward, as is the case for many excellent games.
|
| Agreed on the reading-upside-down thing, though I think it's
| still the right choice. But I suspect it's something anyone
| playing the game regularly would become adept at very quickly.
| Maybe just add a quick "rotate board" button / hotkey to use
| when evaluating the opponent's position.
|
| I think my one minor criticism is the "touching the opponent's
| town" thing. I find that it's not a particularly fun goal. Many
| such things go with a "war" analogy to add some interest, like
| an army destroying the opponent's fortress or whatever. If
| you'd prefer to avoid that (though the "attacking" and
| "defending" language is already in the game), it could be like
| you're building a path for a rabbit to get a carrot, or maybe
| it's water and you're building a bridge to the other side.
|
| Or the win state could instead be to eliminate all the
| opponent's letters. As-is, that would eliminate the fun
| "racing" mechanic, which would be unfortunate. But perhaps
| (going back to the bridge idea), the "town" squares could be
| like bridge supports, and reaching one would knock out anything
| it is "holding up". So you could still race to knock out the
| critical "root" support, which would usually win in nearly the
| same way as currently (but maybe with a few more cleanup
| moves).
|
| Love the game! Hope the ideas are interesting rather than
| annoying :)
|
| Edit to add: Oh! One thing I actually missed in the tutorial
| (but figured out in the example game) is that words must be
| valid top-to-bottom or left-to-right. I was confused by the
| outcome of some battles in my initial games, due to building
| "valid" words bottom-to-top only to see them defeated by
| shorter ones. Relatedly, maybe in the "easy" modes, valid words
| could be highlighted? Then I would have known that when I built
| "yria" from top-to-bottom, it was not actually the valid word
| "airy" read from bottom-to-top.
| liambigelow wrote:
| Amazing! Thanks for the detailed thoughts.
|
| Yes, we once posited that you were trying to deliver soup to
| the other town haha. The current language is really in lieu
| of figuring out what the best lore for the game is, and these
| are great suggestions we can mull over :)
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yes, perfect! The same (/ similar) mechanics, but with
| improved "lore" sounds great. The lore could even change
| puzzle to puzzle; _now_ those pesky townspeople want salad
| instead of soup! :)
| liambigelow wrote:
| Thanks! And thanks for the great feedback -- the tutorial is
| indeed long, but that just means more (fun) iteration to go!
|
| > Why did my opponent place qxa to begin with?
|
| Much like us, the NPC can be plagued with a simply terrible
| hand ;)
|
| Again, appreciate the notes!
| gmargari wrote:
| Really nice game, congrats! Just a small note: I just tried and
| swapped two identical letters, effectively yielding my turn. Not
| sure if this allowed by design.
| liambigelow wrote:
| Good point, I think we discussed this in the past and it
| shouldn't be -- which we promptly forgot! Will amend. (and
| thanks!)
| sanderjd wrote:
| I hadn't thought of doing this! But yeah, I agree with what
| you concluded previously - passing turn is too powerful, I
| think.
| jsnell wrote:
| Congrats on both launching and on the unique game design.
|
| This desperately needs a attack result preview, or if that's too
| hard at least a "you're starting an attack you'll lose" warning
| of some kind. The combat resolution rules are unintuitive, and I
| keep sometimes incorrectly predicting the results, and sometimes
| even not understanding why I lost despite the information in the
| battle pane. Losing an attack is so crippling that you might as
| well resign.
|
| It doesn't help that the only place to find the rules is
| scattered about in a tedious tutorial. The tutorial itself can't
| be fixed; it's the nature of tutorials to suck. But it'd be great
| to have a help page with the rules accessible somewhere. The
| rules aren't long, so it doesn't seem incompatible with the
| aesthetics of the game.
| liambigelow wrote:
| Thanks! I can't say I disagree -- we hoped to structure the
| tutorial as a sequence of rules, but the explanations tend to
| grow. A concise reference would indeed be good.
|
| > This desperately needs a attack result preview
|
| Not too hard, just waiting for all the feedback to roll in
| before deciding either way. If we stay sitting on the fence, it
| might make its way in as a "tutor" mode :)
| sanderjd wrote:
| Personally, I disagree on adding this, outside a "tutor"
| mode. Figuring out if I'm blundering (and requiring my
| opponent to do the same) is a big part of the fun. Without
| that potential for mistake, I think it would be like chess
| masters playing themselves to a draw in every game.
| jsnell wrote:
| I don't think that's a good analogy. In chess, there's no
| question of how a move will resolve. You might not be able
| to predict the future consequences of the move, but every
| single player will always know without error what the board
| state will be after the move.
|
| That's not the case here; any time you attack, there are
| two possible end states for the board. It's often not
| immediately obvious which of the two you'll end up in, but
| the outcome is deterministic and the process to determine
| the outcome is mechanical. The optimal way to play the game
| is to just manually do all these mechanical dictionary
| lookups and rule checks. That's tedious, not fun.
|
| Having a battle preview (and word highlighting as suggested
| elsewhere) wouldn't actually remove any of the actual skill
| involved in memorizing a word list, reading upside down, or
| being able to visualize the outcomes. Having that knowledge
| is a prerequisite for building a good board. All that these
| better visualizations achieve is allow people to build that
| knowledge and those skills organically while playing the
| game.
|
| And "playing the game" is a key part there. In the current
| state the game is so unergonomic that I predict 99.9% of
| the players bounce before winning a single game on the
| easiest difficulty, and never return. Chess can afford to
| be harsh and unforgiving because it's got hundreds of years
| of momentum behind it, and a history of being played on a
| board without any digital quality of life features. New
| games don't have that benefit.
|
| It's probably more instructive to look at other word games.
| What happens in Scrabble if you use an invalid word? You
| forfeit a turn. Worldle? Nothing. In this game you'll lose
| a dozen rounds worth of board development.
| jsnell wrote:
| Some more feedback after trying to play the game again in
| a mode where I'd at least be certain of the outcome of my
| own moves:
|
| - Opening the dictionary lookup requires two clicks, and
| then a third to focus the text entry. It needs a hotkey,
| and must focus the text entry no matter how it was
| opened.
|
| - I'd expect to be able to dismiss the dictionary lookup
| page with Esc, but it requires yet one click.
|
| - The dictionary lookup covers up parts of the board, and
| makes the visible parts hard to read. This makes looking
| up multiple words in one go pretty inconvenient.
| liambigelow wrote:
| Thanks for the great notes!
|
| Agree on all front re: the dictionary ergonomics. We'll
| look at smoothing that out (mobile is currently the
| blocker there, but everything is solvable :)
|
| Re: visualizations, you make great points. Definitely
| something for us to mull over, and I do think some amount
| of this will make it into the game (at least behind an
| option, which defaults to on).
|
| Thanks again!
| someone7x wrote:
| To chime in further, the battle log would be more legible if
| it listed the rules that applied.
|
| Eg:
|
| Defender bonus = 2
|
| Shortest word = 2 (*in*, top, sugar)
|
| Attacker word = 5 (*twine*)
|
| Attacker wins (5-4=1)
|
| At least for me I'm always getting ganked and trying to
| decipher the battle log to see why it didn't do what I
| expected.
|
| That being said, thanks it is fun.
| liambigelow wrote:
| Nice! We've had this on the list for a while so this is
| great validation for building it :)
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| The game looks great!
|
| One way to fix the tutorial is to make it more interactive
| than just asking players to place a specific tile in a
| specific place. Once you explain the most fundamental rules,
| introduce subsequent ones in the form of mini games where
| players decide what tiles to put and where, and can lose.
| Have a look at the Queen's Gambit game about chess. It is
| free if you have a Netflix subscription.
|
| One feature that I would request is to let me organize my
| tiles. Just my 2 cents.
| liambigelow wrote:
| Good ideas, will check out the queens gambit game :)
| newzisforsukas wrote:
| It was more frustrating than fun for me
| zuminator wrote:
| I'd like some indication that a word was invalid, say, if the
| tiles comprising that word were faded, so I wouldn't have to keep
| looking words up before every other move. Either that, or have a
| top level button for the dictionary, and when it opens list all
| the valid words currently in play so you can see at a glance if
| your opponent's word will be hazardous.
|
| I also agree with the other comment that said knowing the outcome
| of your potential move would be helpful. Maybe even a training
| mode where every time you're about to self-own, the game displays
| a question mark and gives you a chance to retract the move.
|
| The only other thing is, and I don't know how much it would
| impact gameplay, but having two-letter words count as valid seems
| like a cheat somehow because of all the sketchy ones like "oi"
| and "er." I wish the game could be configured to only accept 3+
| letter words.
|
| Overall, gameplay was interesting, but as it stands, not
| addictive.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Congrats, this looks awesome and I appreciate the thought and
| effort that go into defining a working game. That said, some
| comments:
|
| 1. Maybe (definitely maybe, not sure about this) highlight valid
| and invalid words on the board. It depends on the emphasis. The
| (scrabble?) dictionary is large and capricious.
|
| 2. The rules for battles seem counterintuitive: if you have an
| invalid word and a winning word, the invalid word loses, but if
| you have a losing word and a winning word, the winning word wins?
| And if your opponent has a winning word and a losing or invalid
| word, their losing/invalid word goes away, but their winning word
| stays (except any letters touching your placed tile) while if you
| have an invalid word and a winning word, your whole winning word
| goes away?
|
| 3. What happens in a battle between two invalid words?
|
| Again, congrats, and especially on doing this in rust, it must be
| super-performant :-)
| jbmny wrote:
| The rules took a while to get used to, but after a couple games I
| was hooked! You start to get a feel for what works and what
| doesn't, and it's not quite the same as Scrabble and similar
| games. Unique and challenging -- great work!
| pimlottc wrote:
| UI feedback: There needs to be more animation to make the
| transition between game states more clear.
|
| For example, when you draw a new tile, it could slide in, or
| glow/sparkle, helping draw your attention to it. When it just
| appears, it's not immediately clear which tile just changed.
|
| Battles in particular would benefit from animation, highlighting
| which words are valid/invalid, which particular words are the
| "strongest" words on each side, and which tiles are truncated in
| the aftermath.
|
| These animations don't need to be long or elaborate, and advanced
| players may even want to toggle them off, but they will be very
| helpful for newer players.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Gameplay feedback: it feels like you have to win (or lose)
| quickly, else the middle board gets cramped and it bogs down to a
| long slog. Sometimes I dropped junk in protected areas of the
| game just to wait for my opponent to be forced to touch my "front
| line".
|
| I also desperately wanted to be able to exchange tiles. Getting a
| rack full of vowels is frustrating, you just have to waste turns
| playing them out knowing they will weaken your board and get
| destroyed.
| nathancahill wrote:
| Played for a while and agree with the feedback. Too many
| vowels, I'm trying to understand why that is compared to
| Scrabble. I think because the words are formed incrementally vs
| Scrabble where all tiles are placed at once.
| jameshart wrote:
| Everyone's take on a game is going to be subjective, but just
| to counter some of this feedback... For me, these aren't
| gameplay weaknesses - they're a summary of what makes eking out
| a win satisfying.
|
| > it feels like you have to win (or lose) quickly, else the
| middle board gets cramped and it bogs down to a long slog.
|
| Why is that a bad thing? If games always resulted in a quick
| win for whoever gets the lucky start/letter draw, where would
| be the fun? Restricted territory in the middle of the board is
| what the players have to overcome.
|
| > Sometimes I dropped junk in protected areas of the game just
| to wait for my opponent to be forced to touch my "front line".
|
| That sounds like a sound strategy. It forces you to spend a
| resource (protected space; potentially useful tiles) in order
| to take advantage of the defensive advantage, with the
| potential payoff that it can turn the tide of the game. It also
| helps build up a reservoir of usable swappable tiles... but
| using swaps well is also tricky, so it's not pure advantage.
|
| Playing these waiting game phases effectively, for me, _added_
| to the sense of satisfaction in pulling off a win.
|
| > I also desperately wanted to be able to exchange tiles.
| Getting a rack full of vowels is frustrating, you just have to
| waste turns playing them out knowing they will weaken your
| board and get destroyed.
|
| You're not wasting turns, you're getting rid of vowels in order
| to get to draw new letters. Finding ways to make the sacrifices
| without weakening your position requires smart play. Again,
| getting past these obstacles makes for a fun challenge.
| throwaway35777 wrote:
| Really neat. Would be awesome to have online matchmaking. Would
| be interesting to play against another random human.
|
| I enjoy the gameplay, the mechanic of building up big words to
| eat through the opponents structure is really cool! I'm a big
| addict of wordle and quina as well. Word games in general still
| feel unexplored, I always expect them not to be fun and then get
| sucked in.
| navane wrote:
| Somehow my opponents nonsense words kept beating my nonsense
| words. Even though they were within 1 length of each other. Can I
| see a rule summary? I did the tutorial but I don't want to do
| that again.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| No idea how to actually play. "You can only place tiles touching
| your dock or your existing tiles". When you first play, there's
| no other tiles to touch. Trying to place a tile next to 'my'
| dock... shows that error message. There's only one or two places
| to drop a tile, and it's preventing that. :/
|
| EDIT:.... hrm... so the tutorial always shows 'me' at the
| bottom'. Apparently, I'm at the top, and my 'dock' is at the top.
| That's a confusing way to start something. Relying on 'color' of
| tiles alone is just.. this was aggravating.
| wdumaresq wrote:
| It's an interesting game, I think. So far I haven't quite reached
| the point of satisfying gameplay as I keep getting caught in
| traps like forgetting that words need to go down, not up (even
| though I play Scrabble!). I'll try it a few more times.
|
| I also created a word-based strategy game (Crossword Island
| Hopper) with the concepts of capturing territory and battling
| your opponent. It has these differences: 1) Each turn is one
| word, and turns are played simultaneously by all players. 2) In a
| battle the newest word can either be destroyed or letters can be
| converted to your own. 3) Default mode is to win by points but
| there are also modes where you need to connect your words from
| point to point to win, like this game.
|
| You can try it here: http://crosswordislandhopper.com/cih
| jameshart wrote:
| Really enjoyable. Disagree with some of the comments here about
| wanting to be warned if you're about to lose a battle - losing
| battles can be strategically advantageous to dispose of unwanted
| letters and free up board space. It's possible to fight back from
| near defeat - even a total wipeout - and long back-and-forth
| fights across the board can happen. I definitely don't want to be
| prevented from sacrificing.
|
| Maybe a mode where you can see a preview of how a move will play
| out before you commit the move would help.
|
| I do agree with some of the other comments that the letter
| probabilities seem a little unbalanced, but that could just be
| the tendency to remember runs of bad luck in the letter draw.
|
| In terms of dictionary feedback: I'd love to see at a glance on
| the board which words are 'real words' and which are not. Some
| sort of visual highlighting of the letters that are in a word
| would be great.
|
| Having the dictionary _always_ available would be great, rather
| than having to click twice to get into it, then click again to
| focus the lookup field.
|
| The AI never seems to use swaps. Is that deliberate?
| quuxplusone wrote:
| Clicking "Resign" brings up a dialog that asks: "Play again? /
| Resign / Continue playing". Now, obviously the answer to "Play
| again?" is yes -- I don't want to stop playing entirely, I want
| to "Continue playing". But that's the wrong answer and dumps me
| back into the game I was trying to resign!
|
| The dialog should say either "Really resign? / Resign / No, keep
| playing" or else "Resign and play again? / Yes / No, keep
| playing".
|
| I, also, find the game pretty hard: the biggest difficulty is
| that you can't control the letters that come out, so even if you
| know a word that you'd like to make, you might have to spend 20
| turns playing useless letters on the back field while hoping for
| an "S" or whatever.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| OK I'm going to go ahead and say this is an absolutely phenomenal
| game. Great, original idea. I could see myself playing this with
| friends, and it could even be a successful board game, though
| we'd need a legend explaining the different things that can
| happen when a battle occurs (namely, if one of the attack words
| is not valid, the attack outright fails regardless of what's
| defending)
|
| Needs a dictionary also.
|
| For the online version (which is gorgeous) it really needs a
| multiplayer discovery mode.
|
| I'm in room code PEEP if anyone fancies a game:
| https://truncate.town/#PEEP
|
| edit: seems like the board editing in multiplayer mode doesn't
| work
| liambigelow wrote:
| Amazing, thanks for the feedback!
|
| > edit: seems like the board editing in multiplayer mode
| doesn't work
|
| oops, will get onto fixing that
| cassepipe wrote:
| There is a dictionary. Just click on the bottom right arrow and
| click on the dictionary.
| ralferoo wrote:
| I enjoyed this and played for a few hours.
|
| The biggest problem for me is the dictionary - it seems very
| biased towards US English, so for instance I lost one game when
| my base was defended with "soiree" which apparently isn't in the
| dictionary, another one when I was defending the middle of the
| board with "knives" and wanted the s elsewhere, so swapped it for
| a d to make "knived" and immediately lost the next round because
| only "knifed" is in your dictionary, even though both are correct
| in British English. There's a whole load of annoying 2 and 3
| character words that the computer uses that I've never heard of,
| but a couple of the more normal ones weren't accepted. A few
| other people have suggested colouring the words based on whether
| they're in the dictionary, which may help some of the cases, but
| doesn't help when you're trying to build up to a word and then
| discover it's not in your dictionary.
|
| I personally disliked the "weakest link" rule, because there were
| just so many rules, I'd forgotten this one, and fell afoul of it
| a couple of times, before I went back and checked the rules
| again. I can see that maybe I'd like it in the future as when the
| board is fullish, it forces you to weaken your position, but for
| the longest time in one game I had a long word across the centre
| of the board, completely trapping the computer in less than half
| the grid, but it escaped when I made a 2-letter word off that and
| he immediately destroyed my entire defence with a 4-letter word.
| So, it might make the game more fun, but intuitively the longest
| word should be used for defence.
|
| In the end stages of the game, the computer often played really
| stupid choices. Instead of playing a dummy letter somewhere out
| of the way, it often stuck it on the end of a word next to my
| tiles, forced a battle and then lost because it wasn't a word.
| Maybe that's a strategy to clear out bad tiles, but a couple of
| times it completely destroyed its defences by doing that.
|
| On some of the grids, I think it'd be possible to get to the
| computer's dock and not their town, which I guess should be a win
| condition as they would then have no valid move. I certainly got
| it so the computer lost all its tiles, but then didn't want to
| try that out for fear of messing everything up when I was only 1
| square away from the town (and the dock was past it).
|
| I'd kind of like an undo button. A couple of times, I misclicked
| somewhere, and once I'd accidentally clicked on one tile when
| deciding on a swap, and then decided to do a different swap and
| it completely trashed my board instead. That and the potential
| for instant loss of a a good board position and letter choices if
| you play a word that's not in the dictionary, would make this a
| useful feature.
|
| The letter distribution might be better if it's weighted like the
| scrabble letters. One game I had multiple Q, Z, J and V, but not
| a single N the whole game.
| ralferoo wrote:
| > I think it'd be possible to get to the computer's dock and
| not their town, which I guess should be a win condition as they
| would then have no valid move.
|
| Just confirmed that this condition is correctly detected as a
| win!
| ralegh wrote:
| Huge potential, it's annoying in a way that gets me to keep
| playing but maybe slightly too annoying- I have a couple
| suggestions that would change the gameplay a lot so feel free to
| ignore:
|
| Attacks that lose when they are exactly 1 letter longer- if
| winning by 1 was too powerful, these could draw/stalemate,
| letting you fortify your position and potentially attack a turn
| later (giving your opponent a chance to fortify their position).
| It feels a bit cheap to not be able to spell out a word because
| the opponent blocks with a shorter word.
|
| I also find myself trying to plan words but never getting the
| right letters - maybe you could add a view of the next 3/5
| incoming letters to reduce the rng-ness and allow more planning.
|
| Again, great job, I look forward to see how it progresses!
| liambigelow wrote:
| Interesting suggestions, and thanks for the kind words!
| Definitely things to ponder :)
| CmdrKrool wrote:
| Intriguing and fun. I haven't played it enough to confidently
| suggest changes to the game mechanics, but I think they're strong
| enough on their own that any/all added UI comfort would be
| welcome - like others have been saying, a less clunky dictionary
| (maybe right-click on a word on the board to look it up?), and
| maybe a preview of whether your attack is going to succeed or not
| (maybe just on 'easier' levels, since there is an element of not
| making a 'simple' miscalculation while you overthink a complex
| board position, like in Chess. Also, think of a game like Puzzle
| Bobble / Bust-a-Move where the first few levels give you a line
| showing you exactly where your bubble is going to land).
| ncallaway wrote:
| I would _love_ a small visual indicator of which words were valid
| /invalid on the board. Maybe something as simple as valid words
| having slightly green letters, and invalid words having slightly
| red letters. Or a subtle little sparkle effect around letters
| that are part of a valid word.
|
| Especially when I'm having to read my entire opponent's board
| upside down, I find parsing which words are valid/invalid to be a
| time-consuming, mildly frustrating, and not super fun aspect of
| the game.
|
| Maybe that takes _too_ much of the challenge out, but I don 't
| find it's a part of the game I feel like I should have to be good
| at.
|
| Other minor feedback:
|
| - There's no cursor or focus indicator on the search box in the
| dictionary.
|
| - The dictionary should open auto-focused. If I click "open
| dictionary" with the mouse, and start typing nothing happens. I
| have to click on the "search" box before I can type. This is
| especially annoying given the lack of feedback from the above
| point on the search box.
| liambigelow wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback -- it's looking like we'll have to find
| some solution for showing valid words, based on the comments.
|
| (Also, will fix the dictionary, thanks!)
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