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[Ryavis]

Spelling Wizard in
SPELLING WIZARD TEACHES HOW TO SPELL

chaos.foxmage.com/SpellingWizard/

Are you ready for the magical learning funsperience of your lifetime? Then it's time for you to challenge SPELLING WIZARD to a spell duel! The Spelling Wizard is here to show you the Magic of Spelling in this eduventure for 1 to 2 children ages 9 to 99! Children will take one of two exciting roles (both with their own unique playing experience) and learn exciting new vocabulary words that will guarantee a lifetime of being single.


Each player controls their character differently!

THE SPELLING WIZARD:


One player plays as the Spelling Wizard, and must type the word at the bottom of the list as fast as he or she can!
But watch out! If the other player can spell words from your words, it will hurt you!

THE GIRL:


The other player must move with the mouse and pick up letters to spell words four letters or longer! Only the Girl's shadow collects letters on touching them. If the word starts sparkling, left click with the mouse to fire it! The game will even provide a hint, showing a single letter that is guaranteed to lead to a real word. But watch out, if the word isn't a real word, you lose a life!
This player can pick up pickups, to give the Spelling Wizard a hard-to-type bullshit word or to flush his or her current word!






So yeah. This compo came at a bad time for me, so I made something simple.
It's an asymmetrical 1/2 player game, and I didn't have enough time to test it to see if it's actually balanced. So I gave some handicapping options in case one side is better than the other.
If this doesn't work it's because I have very little experience with applets, or I screwed something up due to it being freaking late. Hopefully it does work!

CREDITS:
   Michael W. Thelen, for my dictionary.
   kfh, for the in-game music.
   J. R. Hill, for the menu music.
   John Nesky, for the sound effects.
   Kazerad, for the sprites.

[Fluff]

We played this for a while but had some trouble figuring out what was going on. Eventually we concluded that the wizard types words and tries to shoot the girl with them while she tries to avoid the letters. But we weren't sure what the girl's goal was, exactly. Except just to stay alive, I guess, long as she could.

Our thoughts:

Nonsense words were really hard to type!

Actually, all the words seemed a little long.

Maybe give the wizard a pool of words to choose from when typing so if he wanted something fast he could type a short word but if he wanted something large with a lot of spread he could type that, too.

Ok, after reviewing the instructions here, I realized we had this wrong. The girl is not supposed to dodge letters but collect them. We thought the wizard was trying to shoot letters at the girl, which is why we thought shorter words and a word pool made sense.

No idea what the other pickups did, or what the HUD elements meant.

Overall, kind of an odd, surreal experience -- but fun! Kind of like the vague recollection of a 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. -type nightmare induced from a week of intensive and strict typing classes.

Thanks for making it!

[Ryavis]

Finally I got a reply!

Yeah, I probably should have made a tutorial mode or something, but in all honesty I barely had time to slap some sound effects/music on and stick it online in the end. I agree with you, though, in that I'm kind of worried that the Wizard doesn't have enough "control" over the experience, so to speak. No real strategic decisions to make, just pure type-as-fast-as-you-can action, which I'm worried might be too boring.

One of the pickups (the atom-looking one) gives the Wizard a nonsense word, the other one automatically ejects the girl's letters (for if you have an unfortunate combination of letters).

Thanks for the feedback though!