I usually almost never launch webstarts.
I love applets though
Installers in my opinion should be reserved only for more developed/polished type games. (i.e. Revenge of The Titans or Minecraft) or applications(development tools)
Whew, that was a rush! It took me a few games to figure out the most efficient thing (sometimes) is to just chuck it and go on to the next batch of letters. I’m not sure if I can type fast enough to justify spending any time with 3-letter words unless there is an obvious “family” of similar ones. Also, to figure out I didn’t have to use the mouse. THAT’S when my score started to take off.
I found having the letters taken away as you type them a bit annoying. I would prefer having the board stay stable so I could keep searching/thinking while I type. Maybe because I’m used to that in Boggle. How about the letter half-tones or changes color when you use it?
OK. On that last game, I started to get a little wrung out after about 20 minutes or so, like it was going to keep going on forever unless I just got tired and slacked off. Biggest drag was an increasing tendency to typos. Not sure what to recommend though. Score was something like 1400’s I think. I was tempted to quit but I did lose legitimately, eventually. Maybe the “fine” for quitting a rack should be tied to the number of unfound words? Maybe a “bonus” for getting all the words (in a length category, and for all the words). Might need to check the tuning to make sure the “grab the big ones and move one quickly” strategy isn’t an easy way to “beat it”.
Do you have a high score implementation planned? Then I’d have the goal of beating my last or climbing to the top of the heap.
When I scrolled the window, there was a problem with stuff being left on the screen, and obscuring the “play again” button.
Thanks so much for checking it out. I think you’ve played the game longer than I have! Your tweaks do sound like awesome ideas.
I was thinking of adding a high score list to this game, or games in the future, but honestly, I have no idea how to go about doing it. I’m a newbie with some (a lot of) this stuff, and that’s one aspect that I simply don’t know enough about yet. I’d love to read over any tutorials on how to get a feature like that working though.
Yuck, I just opened up the site in internet explorer, and… yikes. It’s ridiculous how different everything looks in IE compared to Firefox. The top navigation bar isn’t the correct width, the buttons are sized differently, the favicon is nowhere to be seen, the height of your applet seems a bit too short, and stuff is colored wrong or has borders it shouldn’t. So I’m not really surprised to see something else go wrong. I just have no idea what I’m doing on the web development side of things though. Maybe I’ll find somebody who knows more html/css magic who can explain what’s going on to me.
I’m very bad at it ;D. Still it works fine (in applet with Firefox 5).
Most of the time I really wonder what words can be made. You should give them after the game over (I will learn new words :P).
Yeah, that’s a good suggestion. I think if I get around to improving it, I’ll add that, along with the other suggestions I received. Maybe pretty up the display a little bit, too.
It’s a little tricky (for me, anyway) to tweak a game like this- I played with the rules a bit until I could play for a few minutes before getting a game over, but philfrei can keep going for over twenty minutes! I thought it was almost a little too hard, but I also should cater to others who are better at this kind of game than I am. Maybe I should make it so it gets harder as time goes by. Hmm…
I’ve got a ton of really great feedback which I’m definitely going to try to work into the next version. But I already have a new game I’m itching to write, so maybe by the time I can rework this, I’ll have figured out how to do a high scores board!
It does look better, and behaves better, with FireFox. High score of mine: almost 6000. Does that mean I played for almost 100 minutes straight? Jeez. Compulsive. I was trying to break 200 seconds in the bank and printscreen that, but I couldn’t seem to get beyond around 150 in the bank without starting to lose time looking for missed words.
http://www.hexara.com/Images/Time4HighScore.JPG
This often happens with games, that there are certain strategies that do really well that weren’t anticipated. So, you are doing the right thing to post the game and let people play it and see if any such strategies are exposed. I would say, adding enticements to linger (get all the words or get all of a letter-length group) are okay in terms of counteracting this, but someone could just ignore those enticements and proceed with the strategy. So, some scaling to the penalty for quick abandonment? (For example, any unused letters “carry over”? That would be tough!)
Also, I am wondering about your letter picking strategy. I can tell you have been careful to make sure there is at least one vowel. But perhaps the other letters can reflect usage more? There is a famous sequence, something like E,T,A,I,O,S… that is the frequency of letters in English, well known to cipher buffs. One could bias the chance of letters appearing to that. A cheap and easy way to figure odds on letter appearance is to count tiles in a Scrabble set (or Boggle) and set the weights accordingly. Getting an unwieldy set of letters like QVJJEBL – not at all uncommon. And no U guaranteed for the Q? There’s only a few good u-less words, like QAT (a lifesaver in Bananagrams).
The words missed would be nice to know sometimes, though I would want the mechanism to not cost “anything” in terms of timing. Perhaps a key could store the missed words? You might be detered since this requires looking up every possible word, but the cost of that is probably less than you think. A tree search based on letter position is fine, going depth first, because if the beginning letters don’t match, that cuts the branch. I’ve done some of this for a “word” version of Hexara.
Quite fun! I hope you decide to try polishing/finishing, as it is a nice twist on a great theme. Oh, there are a couple games, like at Yahoo or Pogo (WordTwist or something) I can’t recall. It might be good to survey them to see if you’ve duplicated something. If I remember correctly, though, most are the sort of thing where you are given a time limit–how many can you find in 180 seconds, for example. Not like yours where you can earn time.
Wow, that is completely awesome. I won’t get too sentimental here, but knowing that I created a little game that a stranger enjoyed enough to play for that long is a bit of a “moment” for me, haha. Thanks again for taking the time to play around in different browsers and everything.
And yeah, one thing I’m getting from this is that a high scores feature is pretty much a requirement for a game like this. Argh, I wish I could find an easy “this is how you get a basic high score board going”, because I honestly have no idea how to even start. I’ve only done Swing and Java2D stuff. Maybe if I can’t find something on google I’ll post another topic asking for pointers.
[quote=“philfrei,post:26,topic:36868”]
That sort-of was the strategy I was trying to encourage, I just didn’t expect anybody would be THAT good at it! I get frustrated with games that force you to find the longest word before moving onto the next round, even if you have all of the other words. This was a little bit like my answer to that frustration, but I’ll definitely rework the balance before version two point oh.
Having letters carry over to the next round might make it easier, since you don’t have to get the longest word. Having more letters means you can form more words. I actually thought of having different numbers of letters, maybe even a bonus round that had 12 letters or something ridiculous, just to add a little something that the other games like this don’t have. Maybe I could use that as an incentive- if you get all of the words in a length group, one of the letters carries over, or something like that.
[quote=“philfrei,post:26,topic:36868”]
To be quite honest, my letter picking algorithm is really dumb. The only thing it does is make sure that the list of words that can be formed from that letter string contains more than 10 words. If it doesn’t, it generates a new random list of letters. I’d probably pay closer attention to that in the next version.
[quote=“philfrei,post:26,topic:36868”]
I actually already have a list of the missed words- I calculate all of the possible words before the beginning of the round, and it only takes a couple seconds (with any optimization, I could even trim that down, but I don’t really see the point because it’s happening behind the scenes). That’s the list I use to determine whether a word is valid or not- it wouldn’t be hard to display them between rounds for a few seconds.
[quote=“philfrei,post:26,topic:36868”]
It’s so awesome to hear somebody enjoyed something I made! I was expecting mostly replies like “that’s ugly, get out of here”, so this is an amazing surprise. Thank you thank you thank you!
I think I’ll come back to this game, once I pound out the game that’s been stuck in my head- then I’ll figure out how to implement a high score board, and come back to this.
Very useful tutorial if you want to learn networking and high scores: http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/networking/sockets/
Thanks for the link. I’ve actually done some socket programming (way back in high school), and I can probably wrestle with the programming side of it. I guess my ignorance is mostly with the logistics- how do I even get a server set up? I can get a simple server and client running on a single computer, but the vastness of the internet scares me. Should I use a home computer that’s always running, or should I use my site’s host (hostgator)? Either way, what goes into setting it up? Or am I going about this the wrong way- should I look into using a database of some kind? Eek!
I know the answers to these questions are “try it and see what happens”, so I suppose that’s my next step.
The Internet isn’t so vast as you might think. It’s just a bunch of computers/routers connected to each other and a crapload of bytes running around like crazy 
You just need to open a port of your server on your router and computer and that’s it. You can use your IP address to connect to the server from anywhere. Of course you do need a dedicated 24/7/365 online computer so if you have a spare, it’s good enough.
Databases are used for data storage and organization, such as high scores, user data, etc…
I currently have a spare laptop running 2 servers which are powering my games 
Can it really be that simple? I can’t wait to try it out. I guess the next step is figuring out how to keep the source available without giving everybody access to write whatever they want to the server. I’ll figure that out as I go though.
Thanks again for all your help. Now I’m really excited to try this out.
If all you’re trying to do is make a high-score board then I would recommend something simpler:
- On your main website create some kind of html form input that will accept a submission, add it to a database or file, and display the results.
- Test your form submission by creating a dummy html submit page that submits to your form.
- Rig your game to submit the high-score to this html form.
This scenario is using any web server as your server. Full blown client/server networking with sockets only makes sense if you want to create a multiplayer game.
Very nice to play. You can save up a lot space to reduce the window size. There’re so many empty space and two unused buttons (I believe it’s faster to press Space then clicking with mouse) to be removed.
I’ll definitely have to check that out as an option as well. I’m still really new to the web stuff, so it will take some playing around. From my initial googling, it seems like this might be a simpler alternative.
Thanks for the feedback. Maybe condensing everything will be a part of the “2.0” modifications. I don’t want things to be too squished though (especially if I’m going for larger character pools), and I think the buttons make it easier for somebody to jump in without reading the directions too carefully first.