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Loople's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #275 | 4.312 | 4.312 |
| Enjoyment | #1417 | 3.562 | 3.562 |
| Artwork | #4458 | 2.875 | 2.875 |
| Narrative | #5588 | 2.000 | 2.000 |
| Audio | #7892 | 1.625 | 1.625 |
Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
The game has a set of 3 to 4 words that loop together, as the last letter of one word is the start of another.
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
Electronic Frontier Foundation - English word dataset
Florida State University - Basic 2000 English word dataset
(Optional) What would you like to be called if GMTK features your game?
SudTheBud
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Comments
This is a really fun one, even if I'm terrible at it. I won't repeat my suggestions (as they are largely the same as others) but for a concept put into action in only 12 hours I'm crazy impressed at how polished it is!
Thank you so much for the kind words! I really appreciate you taking the time to play it. I'm glad you found it fun :)
Ooh this is an interesting take. I mostly agree with what everyone else has said about improving the UI so I won’t repeat that. Between the UI and my own incompetence at the game, I did find it a bit hard, but I still find this a really nice idea. A word/clue history definitely would have definitely made it better.
Thanks for playing! It's still good to hear feedback on the UI, the consistency of it being brought up makes it a priority.
its one of those games that I want to see in the google play. its fun. nice job
Thanks, I appreciate the kind words!
Its a wonderful game, and great fun! It takes a bit of getting used to but its a good puzzle. I wish that information your learned would be retained somehow. Or at least that you could undo inputs you have done, but there is only so much you can ask for in a jam game I suppose (esspecially one made in 12 hours). Well done!
Thank you so much for the kind words! I know the game has been a bit tough for a bunch of people without a word history mechanic, haha, but I appreciate you playing regardless!
Really great idea, however i think letters should not rotate, always be in the “normal” rotation, but its done in 12 hours, cannot really complain much >.< some sounds would be cool too!
Thanks for playing, and appreciate the feedback! I agree with the feedback on rotation, and I really wish I had had the time to add sound!
Cool idea for a game I'm really impressed you managed to make this in such a short time frame. My only nitpick is it would be nice to see the loop rotate because that would make it easier to keep track of the words but overall great submission - well done!
Thank you so much for playing, and I agree with the feedback!
Wow, it's a surprise to see another Loople game! It's really interesting to see how differently we took the Loop + Wordle idea.
This is very creative and impressive given that it was built in 12 hours. Only one thing I would suggest would be to have the base of the letters aligned for legibility. Especially as some letters are a bit ambiguous at certain angles. Z and N at 90 degrees look alike, as do W/M in some cases.
For the English language data set, I would also recommend this website which I used for my game which I found very helpful.
Oh wow, it's awesome to see another Loople creator - great minds think alike! I'm really curious to see how your game plays now.
I really appreciate the kind words. I did consider aligning the letters at first, but decided to rotate them thinking it would be more clear that the words at the top of the loop weren't spelled backwards. Looking back, that was probably a mistake. I didn't consider that some letters would look like others when rotated, though, so that was a nice catch!
Thanks so much for checking out the game, and for the dataset recommendation! It took me forever to find a decent enough wordbank that was also age appropriate - I was never able to find this word dataset while searching, so it's incredible that you were able to find it! I really appreciate you sending it my way!
Ah yes. I had a similar concern that it would not be clear that the wheel goes clockwise, as the letters on the bottom of the wheel would appear to go in reverse. I had a lot of Twitch streamers play the game and thankfully that wasn't an issue. I did consider having in addition to a wheel a horizontal text box below that would show what had been submitted but I thought it might clutter and confuse the UI a bit more.
This is a mockup I put together quickly to demonstrate:
With the list of words it also took me a long time to find a decent one. First day I worked with this which had 466k words, many of them slang, outdated or abbreviations. The one I use now has 172k words which is much better (specifically used for word games). I removed a few hundred words that were less than 3 characters but the tricky part was removing all the profanity and proper nouns which involved finding other filters online and a lot of manual work.
Interesting to see your UI considerations along the way! Yeah, when I was playing your game it was pretty clear what order the letters were in and what words they formed, so I guess I took for granted how intuitive something like that would be for a player haha. I thought about doing something similar with the UI, with having a space on the right side where a list of words you entered would pop up so you could see it in a more readable horizontal format. I still want to do a word history mechanic, but now I think I would keep it as a smaller loop inside the bigger one - the player would probably be less confused if they could see the loop formatted the same way they solved it.
The list of words thing was such a pain lol. I think I might have seen the same GitHub repo, but given that I was under such little time and I was losing sleep, I didn't want to bother spending time going through thousands of words and removing inappropriate ones, so I had to just stick with something small (searching for that itself took like an hour). Wrote a Python script to extract all the words, take any word between 3 and 7 letters, and sort them by the first and last letter (i.e. "ad" : ["and", "ampersand"]), then dumped that in a JSON. The algorithm to find a few words that loop back around to each other had to backtrack, so I thought it would find itself in an instance where it would take a few seconds to find a valid loop especially with such a limited amount of words, but thankfully it seems to work fairly quickly.
Yes, It can be really tough to balance indicating the mechanic visually (as a loop) whilst also ensuring readability. I suppose for a first time player it's really important to learn the mechanic and then as people play more the focus is on readability.
Perhaps a loop that wraps around the screen could work? As long as it's clear it loops and you can see all the chars on the screen. Maybe something like this HTML carousel demo. Except pressing left/right would move it by one character in each direction, highlighting the middle character that is to be set and showing all the other words before/after?
That's a really smart solution for algorithm. I was also surprised with how quickly I could work out the word combinations in the browser using JS and how I didn't need to optimise it at all.
I think your solution is really interesting, although I wonder if all the characters would be able to fit. It might work if there's a bit of a 3D effect, where part of the loop appears in front, and part of the loop appears behind and faded a little bit so it looks like it's a bit behind the screen. It would also probably allow for some loops that could be shown above to detail the history of the characters you entered.
That's awesome that our algorithms ended up being really quick! I guess we underestimate the power of machines, haha.
Nice game! It is a very cool wordle-like concept, and one of the more creative interpretations of the theme that I have seen. I am embarrassed to say this, but it took me 2 or 3 turns to figure out the colors. I would recommend forcing at least 2 of the words to be valid words, though, because I was able to "cheese" the game quite easily by guessing most of the common letters remaining at one point. I got it in 6 guesses first try though :).
Thanks for playing my game! Yeah lol, I felt really stupid realizing I wasn't actually checking if a word was valid about 24 hours after submitting to the jam. But 6 guesses is really impressive!
This is really good! An absolute mindbender in comparison to Wordle though, but in a good way. Well done! I hope you get more ratings. I also hope Mark gets this on stream, because he will have a meltdown.
Thank you so much for playing! Would give up all the ratings in the world to break Mark's brain, haha.
Nice looking game, I think this deserves more than 3 ratings. I recommend scheduling the time in the already limited time you had to Upload in HTML to get a better fan base.
Thanks! Yeah, lesson definitely learned for next time haha.
Very cool idea, simple but effective and considered the theme well. Funny how sometimes it takes so long to get the perfect idea eh?
The spinning was a little disorientating for me, but still well done! I know you were under a time budget but if you update it again I'd like to see a little reminder/indicator of what your last guess was or if it was correct. I could easily see this being a popular mobile game!
Aww thanks! Haha, for sure, if I had more time those would've been the first things I tried to implement. Appreciate you playing my game and giving feedback!
Love the idea, it would be nice if you could see guesses made previously, but the game is really well made in ONLY 12 HOURS???
Haha thanks, I really appreciate you taking the time to check it out!
Love this idea! Big fan of wordle and this was a bit hard to wrap my brain around but quite enjoyable once I did. Needed to take notes to solve it, so if you want to update this game, I would recommend little bubbles next to each letter that tells you what your previous guess was. Also have an animation to show the wheel spinning so the change isn't so disorienting.
Overall a great game! Here is a screenshot of my first solve!
Wow, nice job, I haven't even solved it yet! Really appreciate the feedback and thanks for playing my game!
Also was reading this comment again, I'm humbled that you were willing to play the game enough to take notes :O really grateful!
Mark the download as windows so the itch app can install it
Whoops, thanks for the heads up.