VERBAL - the fast-paced thinking word game

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#21

Still playing this a bit. The puzzle mode seems hard to me because most of the time I’ve never heard of the 9 letter word, even with the clue letters! :’(

Clearly I need to hit the dictionary, but I wonder how many people, especially younger players, would know any of the typical run of 15 solutions I called up as I type this post. In beat-the-clock mode it doesn’t matter so much because you don’t actually need the 9 letter word.

mongeries
theropods
solarized
nomadizes
deathsmen
rutaceous
kryolites
gallstone
pargasite
derivates
prelatess
franziest
rhodanise
vitaliser
extremals

(I challenge you to reply using all those words correctly in sentences :D)

#22

erm, need an easy mode for puzzle clearly. I’ve been trying to think of a way to sort out the eay words - perhaps I just have to do it manually :frowning:

#23

I agree that many of the 9-letter words listed by @richierich are on the obscure side, but as they are more of a bonus than a main feature, they don’t need to be as accessible or easy as the basic game play. Also, a lot of those words are perfectly reasonable. For example, I’ve seen “theropods” in Calvin & Hobbes cartoons.

For comparison (word lengths in current commercially successful products):

  • In Scrabble, 7-letters is a threshold for bonus points.
  • In Boggle, 8-letters or more yield the highest per-word score (11 pts, vs 5 points for 7-letter words).
  • There is a Sunday puzzle feature (related to the Scrabble brand, I think) that features 5 or 6 7-letter collections to descramble and form into the highest Scrabble score possible.

So, 9 is unique, AFAIK. That can be good (branding), but it can also be risky (unproven).

Sorting out “easier” words manually should be avoidable. (One would hope! It would be a huge, time-consuming task.)

Ideas:
Look for work-frequency charts, “easier” words will tend to appear more frequently than obscure words.
Look for word lists or vocabulary lists geared for ESL or grade school levels.
And cross-reference.
[EDIT: uh, actually, if the only thing that needs this sort of evaluation is the 9-letter word list, maybe that isn’t such a terrible task. There only has to be one per puzzle. How many puzzles will be packaged with the game? Are they stored, or generated?]

#24

They have a puzzle in the Times every day called “Polygon” which varies in numbers of letters (7-10 or thereabouts) and is more like “beat the clock” mode of Verbal. But there’s always a unique word using all the letters. No idea how they decide the words - maybe some person just chooses them by eye - not too difficult if it’s just one a day I guess! Probably run an automatic uniqueness check as well - don’t know if Verbal does that?

#25

I have 4000 puzzles to filter into Easy for the find-the-word mode. ESL-type word lists don’t really help as we need to match the word form exactly.

I think the manual approach is least hours of effort (given that time has to be spent researching and programming the alternatives). I will write a command line tool which shows me one word at a time and I will hit 1 for easy, 2 for maybe, and 3 for hard. Doing one word every two seconds will take 8000 seconds or two hours. Proper programming the solution would take much longer, and would yield lower quality.

The way I play Puzzle Mode, I don’t particularly care that I don’t know the word. It is enough of a challenge finding good clues, and there is the fun of using the rules of spelling to deduce what the word must be from the clues found and the letter pool. But I imagine I am a good player, and my average is only 343 (max 1000) so the game is too hard. It was even harder before I let 5-letter words unlock clues :o

I find I play puzzle mode mostly now. It is exactly the right length to play while waiting for the metro or the kettle.

#26

Verbal allows more than one 9-letter word per set of letters. Puzzles with more than one solution are surprisingly common. This is fine for beat-the-clock mode but it is a bit of a problem for solve-the-puzzle! At the moment, finding the “wrong” solution only unlocks a couple of free clues.

#27

I have started work on this again. My main goal is to make the game experience smoother with no random lags and glitches, which I now understand to be due to my overuse of AsynchTasks. I also have plans for three new game modes, Heavy Hitter, Sausage Factory and Wordtris.

#28

I now have an Android Emulator working. Am still new with Android stuff, and don’t have a phone or tablet yet. Do you know if it is possible to run your game on the emulator? Any instructions for how to do so? I’m running the emulator via Android Studio on Linux PC.

#29

I don’t know… I have never got an android emulator working myself :frowning:

#30

I just tried the obvious thing: fired up the browser on the emulator and navigated to Verbal in the game store!

Unfortunately, it seems that Google doesn’t want emulator customers. There is no “Google Play App” on the emulator device. There do appear to be ways to get around this, but I’m not sure I want to take that route (if it is indeed a copyright issue).


http://www.flinkd.org/2015/02/installing-google-play-on-the-android-emulator-api-21-lollipop/

Genymotion and something called Xamarin both look like they both provide emulators and a legitimate, working Google Play Store app for them.

I’m guessing the only other way I could run your game would be to release a project source file of some sort. I still learning about all this stuff and am I don’t know if there is a way to do that while not revealing source code (as one can with a Java jar file). Also I’m not clear if project source files come in a single format–i.e., Android Studio project seems to be structured differently from an Eclipse project. Surely someone else will know this?

“Verbal” has one drawback as a game name: when I did a search at the Google Store, there were a LOT of hits. I had to pass through something like a dozen screens before spotting your game. Maybe (for future projects) it makes sense to come up with a unique name.

If you ever do decide to try getting an emulator working, I’d be happy to help trouble shoot. I’ve personally encountered and solved a couple dozen gotcha’s in the process of solving it for my PC. But there are always new issues arising, and Android dev really does seem to be a moving target.

#31

ags1 can send you the apk file via email for example, and you can install the apk on your emulator.

#32

I will put the APK somewhere accessible…

#33

A quick google shows me that some kind souls have uploaded my APK to their rival app stores:

https://www.google.nl/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1CHFX_enNL510NL510&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=APK+VERBAL+agnes&safe=active

Not sure if all these sites are trustworthy…?

#34

I’m working on some new game modes:

  • a “clear the letters” version, where you have to use all the letters in as few moves as possible

  • a level based version, to provide a more definite escalation of difficulty compared to the original Race the Clock version

  • a new puzzle version based on 7 letter words

Also… I have feedback to make the game colors brighter, to add a dictionary service, and implement goggle play achievements and leaderboards.

Hmmm, maybe in-app purchases? Major updates on the way anyway.

#35

Tried out a new cleaner, brighter user interface today… What do you think? I also made the smoke rings smokier.

Here is the older darker UI (ignore the color difference, the color changes based on time remaining).

#36

Verbal runs great on the emulator I have via Android Studio on Linux. I will try the device I have soon, but might not be able to get to it today.

The version I have has two games: the original speed challenge and the game for finding a 9-letter word using 6-8 letter words to generate clues. I like having the two modes of play to choose between. Sometimes one wants to go for a rush, sometimes one wants to ponder.

I have a suggestion/request for the “Solve the Puzzle” game. Would it be okay to enable one to click and drag the letters to rearrange them? I was having a lot of trouble trying to keep track mentally of what letters might be where. In Scrabble, one can move the tiles about on the tray, and this is very helpful for visualization. Just a swap function between two tiles would add a lot. I found myself occasionally using the strategy of trying out plausible 9-letter words while taking care to avoid 6-8 in the process. Actually managed to score 950 on one of my rounds! Of course there is some luck as some words are easier to find than others.

I was a bit skeptical that a word game would work without a keyboard. For example, with online Boggle, is impossible to get a decent score while only using the mouse to click out words. But you managed to make it work quite well! I think that is a big accomplishment.

One other idea–it would be nice, maybe, if one could add prefixes to an existing word and also get bonuses. For example, I’m thinking click and drag the first letter one (or more) to the right, leaving the first spot empty, then filling it in. BOARD becomes ABOARD, say. (Or have a little button for rightwards rotations.)

I found myself a little miffed at having to redo entire words when only the first letter needs changing. FIGHTER LIGHTER
for example. But that would also add a complication to the UI, requiring drag-and-drop or some other solution.

The background graphics are nicely done. They definitely add polish, but at the same time do not distract.

Definitely a fun game!

#37

Thanks for the positive feedback. I will have to think about how to add in your gameplay suggestions if possible.

I have also struggled with mentally arranging letters while solving the puzzles. An idea I had to ameliorate this would be to offer clues instead of instantly awarding them. So the player could choose to accept a mediocre 5-letter clue or they could discard it. That way you can safely use the word bar to experiment without hurting your score, and you won’t get mugged by low value clues any more.

#38

Perhaps I can implement swipe gestures to rotate left/right, with an upward swipe to remove just one letter from the word bar. So starting with BAR, right swipe twice to insert two empty slots at the beginning, then play RE for REBAR.

Or, left swipe BAR once to get AR, then play BOR for ARBOR.

Or, upward swipe the B in BAR and play O for OAR.

#39

I like these ideas!

That suggestion helps with the mugging, which happened a couple times to me before I understood what was going on. But the strain on working memory is still pretty high for folks who want to “play Scrabble” with their tiles. Maybe that’s a feature, something the Lumosity folks would brag on.

An idea occurs to me: highlighting or otherwise marking the clued letters to make it easier to sort out those where you know where they go versus those that need maneuvering into place. That’s one less thing to keep track of mentally, alleviating a bit of the struggle.

#40

Yes, highlighting the “solved” letters is very easy for me to implement, as I already have color highlighting for letters in the Race The Clock mode.

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On the subject of getting definitions for words, I have this option:

https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=deathsmen&printable=yes

Obviously I need to detect when the word is a plural, in which case i need to pull the singular definition “An executioner; a headsman or hangman.”

Many of the words in my list are not findable in Wiktionary, I suppose those can be moved to the Hard mode.

To avoid requiring Android permissions, I may preload the wiktionary content (with due credits).