VERBAL - the fast-paced thinking word game

Showcase
#1

Verbal is a fast-paced word game where you must use your brains and your vocabulary.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.clarke.agnes.verbal

The game features two mind-bending play modes: Race the Clock and Solve the Puzzle.

Race the Clock

Find as many words as you can before the clock runs out! Bigger words get more score and give you extra time.

Bonus letters: As your score goes up, some letters start to glow yellow - these are bonus letters. Play a bonus letter to double your score, or save up the bonus letters for even bigger bonuses. A word with two bonus letters gets 5x score, 3 bonus letters get 10x score.

Combo words: If you make a word and immediately make a longer word from the same word, you score a combo word bonus. For example, if you form TOAST and then TOASTER and then TOASTERS, each of the longer words gets a combo word bonus.

Solve the Puzzle

Find the nine letter word hidden in the scrambled letters. Play 5, 6, 7 and 8 letter words to reveal letters of the hidden word.

Play wisely - each letter you reveal costs you a little score… But if you reveal the letter with an 8-letter word it costs less than if you only made a 5-letter word.

Controls and tips

Tap the letters in the letter pad to add them to your word.

Tap the letters in the word bar to return them to the letter pad. All letters after the letter you tapped are returned, so you can use this to form new words quickly. For example, if you form FLOWS and then tap the S, FLOW will remain in the word bar. Then you can go on to form FLOWERS or FLOWED.

To clear the word bar, tap the first letter in the word bar, or shake your device.

Above, the latest in-development version with eye++ candy. Below, the first version released:

#2

Hi, this is looking excellent - I think with just a bit more interesting gameplay it could be a real winner. Everyone loves word games, not just “gamers” - it’s a huge audience if you nail it. Definitely worth developing it some more, unless you’re really sick of it by now!

Anyway I jotted down some things playing it. Hope none of this sounds negative - I think it’s a fun game and you’ve done a really good job. Keep up the good work :smiley:

Rules
Does it come with instructions? I played without reading the above post fully and was a bit baffled to start with. Only just realized you can clear the word bar with one tap! That was my biggest irritation.

What are the letter scores? Is it the same as scrabble? What determines whether a word gives more time?

Interface
The letters in the word bar are quite small to tap accurately, at least for me with sausage fingers :point: I guess it has to fit 9 across, but maybe they don’t need any spaces between? Did you try doing it in landscape instead of portrait orientation? There seems to be room for the 3x3 rack either way round.

The time left might be better as a bar, or maybe a ticking clockface like Countdown. Reason: you’re concentrating on the letters, so flicking eyes up quickly to check the time is awkward, not to mention you have to switch your mind from “letters” mode to “numbers” mode to read the time.

Also might be nice if there was a button to shuffle your rack around a bit if you can’t see anything with the initial arrangement of the letters. I do that in scrabble all the time :slight_smile:

Use of the trie
Well however you did it it seems to work really well and certainly fast enough on my phone!

Also what impressed me is that there seems to be some kind of algorithm that always gives a reasonably “friendly” rack of letters with some possibilities. How did you do that? Almost feels there might be a 9-letter word in there every time - don’t know if that’s true or not? Maybe the friendly letters algorithm could be made a bit less friendly for a “hard” skill level?

Gameplay
For me it could do with just a little something to keep the game driving on - it’s called “the fast-paced word game” after all. Right now it lasts a couple of minutes per game (for me), but the second half not much happens because I’m out of ideas.

If there was something where you could swap letters, like maybe a 30 second penalty to get a whole new rack, that could make it so a game could keep going for much longer.

The bonus letter thing is great but IMO they don’t come up nearly often enough. I want more dings and whoops!

#3

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. I will be adding some popup help to the game as it does seem to confuse people. I have also found I’ve been high and dry at 90 seconds with no ideas, so it might be a very good idea to buy letters with time. I also have an idea for a no time limit puzzle mode.

I used the trie to generate the puzzles in my IDE, not at runtime, there are 4k puzzles baked into the game, all with a nine letter solution and at least 450 words.

Changing to portrait mode might be a good idea, or at least allowing both orientations. It’s not an issue on my 7” tablet, but on my phone it is a bit fiddly and it affects the scores.

I might bundle a scrabble solver in the game, then the trie would be running on android too :slight_smile:

What’s your high score? My best effort on my phone was around 1000.

Oh by the way, the original design for the game had a thermometer on the side to show the time.

I might add a shuffle letters on shake function down the line.

#4

Got a really nice set of letters and scored 1414 today 8)

Incidentally there seems to be a bug where if the timer is ticking when you exit the main screen it keeps on ticking and doesn’t stop. At one point another one started and there were 2 ticking together :smiley:

Just thinking a bit more about the little letters in the word area. There could be a big “backspace” button to back up 1 letter as an alternative.

#5

I’m having a bit of trouble killing the activity on Back. Still learning my way around Android. I’ve rethought the screen layout and the next version will have bigger word bar letters and I will finally implement the timer thermometer.

…also, I think I will add an Easy mode where bonus letters comne along more frequently.

#6

Was hoping to give this a try, but I don’t have any Android devices. Is there a .jar version that can be downloaded?

#7

No, sorry. This is exclusive to the android platform :slight_smile:

#8

I’ve been working on the eye candy… I have a new visual time bar in the lower left and new smokey ripples.

#9

Is digressal a word?

I like the smoke rings. The other effect looks pretty subtle from the screen shot, but is probably a lot easier to see with animation. Moving things tend to catch the eye.

#10

Good guess, in this case the solution turns out to be glissader. I’ve never yet made a nine-letter word in the game :frowning:

You’ve given me an idea - when the time runs out, the game will show the nine-letter solution (or one of them, many puzzles have multiple solutions).

The other thing to add is richierich’s idea to buy new letters with time.

I also still have to tweak the contrast on the time bar and the score area.

#11

I can’t run the app because I only have Java desktop. :frowning: Are the ripples animated? That would be quite cool, I imagine. You wrote on another post about means of animation that were less cpu-intensive than Perlin’s, so I’m wondering if this is one of those cases.

I am animating a panel in Hexara, using Perlin/Gustavson’s Simplex 2D, and economizing by using the same area data six times at once (using a reflection for three of them). But if you have a cheaper method to share, I’d be interested in learning more about it. (Am also wondering about finding a cheaper way to get cloud effects used in the tuning/drone app I’m working on.)

If the word had been glissando, I bet I would have found it! I had to look up glissade to find out what glissader meant.

#12

I should have used LibGDX, than I would have a Windows version. But I’m writing the thing directly on my tablet and I’m using the basic Android APIs. It seems since I’ve started writing apps, everyone has an iphone.

The smoke rings are animated, and shoot out occasionally from button presses. They are just a geometrical circle with a bell-curve intensity around the radius, where the radius size is multiplied by the mottled background. The background is just a texture (blue channel for the mottles, red to mask the darker shaded areas).

#13

Had a sweet run with the new mechanics, stacked up a new high score :slight_smile:

This weekend I’ll put version 2 on Google Play. I just have to redo a dozen layout XMLs first.

#14

Version 2.01 is now on Google Play - this version incorporates better graphics, more exciting gameplay and more intuitive controls.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.clarke.agnes.verbal

#15

I added a new game mode:

Solve the Puzzle

Find the nine letter word hidden in the scrambled letters. Play 6, 7 and 8 letter words to reveal letters of the hidden word.

Play wisely - each letter you reveal costs you a little score… But if you reveal the letter with an 8-letter word it costs less than if you only made a 6-letter word.

#16

How do I get this moved to Showcase?

#17

Ask a mod. Moved :slight_smile:

#18

Moved to Showcase because I added instructions at last :slight_smile:

Help pops up the first two times you play a game.

#19

If I can get some 10" tablet screen captures, I can get my app classified as Designed for Tablets on Google Play… Can anyone with a big android tablet help me out?

#20

I had to put out version 3.11 to make puzzles a bit easier. Previously, you could either solve a puzzle with a good score or fail with a zero score. Now it is possible to solve the puzzle with a lower score, so it is opened up to younger/less skilled players and it is less frustrating (hopefully).