With the countdown, you more want to care about the high level stuff: Keep your brain agile enough to get the next one, figure out more general patterns, ensure you "cover" the promising patterns, notice tough spots (with tons of patterns) where you you'll need to lock in. That stuff is more fun to focus on than speed.
Everyone wants to fail less, sure. It's not surprising people's feedback focuses on the mechanic that made you fail! That doesn't mean changing that bit will make the game more fun.
The timer doesn’t have to be visible at all until the end.
> Everyone wants to fail less, sure.
It has nothing to do with not wanting to fail. Sometimes people just want to chill a bit or kill a few minutes with a simple word puzzle that engages your game without being stressful. This game doesn’t even let you repeat the challenges you took, so to play it you always have to be highly engaged. That’s fine for some games, but not every game needs to be like that, and this one doesn’t.
No one’s asking timer mode to go away, or even become the default, just to have the alternative option.
As for the second, that's more suggestive and I don't care as much either way. Personally me for me I've just been going down the archive trying each day. I enjoy competitive games, so once I miss a word I don't have much interest in continuing on.
But I'd like to propose allowing keyboard input. Losing because of your mouse skills in a pattern recognition game is annoying.
Anyway, doesn't matter, it was totally my mistake, everything works for me as well as for everyone else.
You click next and it goes to the next word.
I don’t want hints but I can see how others might want that. But you still don’t get credit for hints. Or it shows “x hints used”
Final score can show that you got the first N words in <30s (as it is now), and you can have other stats:
* Total number of consecutive words (even if over time)
* Total number of words
* total words <30 seconds
* Plus whatever hint based metrics you want
Perhaps it is intentionally part of the design, but being a bit of a perfectionist, I failed a couple of times, and found that actually the longer words were (often) easier than the shorter ones...
And at the end there is a “used a hint” badge or not.
2. add a multiplier depending on the number of seconds until solved. [30s / [taken]s = score
eg.: 10s solution gives x3 score
30s = 1 score (1x1)
40s = 0.75
60s 0.5
Maybe a few different modes? How many can you get out of 18, how long can you last (unlimited), and just a chilled relaxed mode.
Fun game, thanks for sharing!
a) the timer would be cumulative, so that solving the early words faster gives more time for the harder words,
b) going negative wouldn't end the game, it would just turn the time red or something, with the goal being to finish all of the words with the highest time-remaining possible, rather than just to win/lose.
Some suggestions people have made around being able to shuffle or place letters - maybe. But the game is pretty perfect as it is.
Absolutely, I had to reopen it a bunch of times in incognito to make it to the end xD
Very fun!
2. Yes being able to continue would be great, it's frustrating that the game just stops.
Great work anyway!
2. Yes
3. I got stuck and couldn't get past RILGUN -- it'd be nice to know what the word you were going for actually was.
i think there is only two valid words: luring and ruling.
I am with the people asking for a scramble/ shuffle button. I have to do anagrams all the time in cryptic crosswords and sometimes it requires seeing things in a totally different order to unlock the answer.
2. I don't have a preference.
Very cool and well done.
"Baith" is incredibly esoteric.
Also a version in which your unused time is accumulated for future rounds would be interesting
That would also let you scale to any arbitrary word length.
Adding a second for each letter you type is a crude version.