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[sAm_vdP]

Hi everyone,

I recently made devlog for my game WordRig, a word puzzle/oil rig "simulator" for Android smartphones, tablets and desktops, which is now in Beta release:



The objective of the game is to get the drill from the top of the screen into the oil at the bottom, by removing words from underneath it. The number of moves is limited, so finding longer words is necessary to beat the harder levels. Scoring is similar to Scrabble and you can compare your score on a given level with your friends' if you're ok with Facebook.




If you do not have access to an Android device, the desktop version only requires Java and is available at http://get.wordrig.de/?desktop

I would appreciate your feedback very very much and I would love to hear what you think of the game or if you run into any crashes or other bugs.

Thank you very much,
Bart

[Uncle Scotty]

This is a cool idea, and it has a lot going for it. The tap controls work well on Android, and it's quite a unique take on word-building games. I did find, however, that the game got boring fairly quickly. I think it's because the levels all felt really similar. If there was a world map or something it would make the progression feel more natural, instead of just going through numbered levels. It would also be cool if there was some sort of competitive multiplayer aspect to it. At the very least some Google Play high score leaderboards. Finally, I ran into a bug on my MotoG phone. The first time I played it it worked fine, but after that every time I opened it the graphics were all dark and all the tiles showed up as black. Rebooting seems to have solved the problem. Good luck with your game! 

[sAm_vdP]

Thank you very much for your feedback! I'll look into the tiles going black, that is definitely a bug.
If you sign in with Facebook, you'll seethe scores that your friends achieved, but that requires enough people to play it of course.
I'm somewhat hesitant to add global leaderboards, because I feel that would invite a lot of cheating. How do you feel about a statement like "You're in the top X%" for each level? Do you think percentiles or absolute numbers would be better? Like Top 5, 10, 100, 1000, 10000?

I agree a world map would be nice, I'll put that on my TODO list. For now, I have to look into a crash that just popped up on Crashlytics

[bornander]

I tried this and I think I liked it, although I wasn't very good at it 

What would get me to play this alot would be a multiplayer mode where I play against someone on identical "maps" and the winner is the one who get's first to the oil.

I think the game looks very polished during game-play, but the UI controls in the menus look a bit off, they look more like programmer art and don't really fit with the rest of the game.
Also, I noticed that when a word was incorrect or cancelled by me it never completely faded away, I could always see a faint version of it until I completed a new word (I don't know if that's a bug).

The tutorial was good, it had the right number of steps and didn't feel tedious to go through like many others are.

Well done on this, keep up the good work.

[sAm_vdP]

Thank you very much for your feedback!

I agree that a head-to-head multiplayer mode would be great. I think having a time limit for the level might be better than a race to the bottom, but I will definitely investigate both options.

You're right about the menu, I built that quite early and never got around to polishing it. I'll what I can do to spice it up a bit And thank you for your report on the fading-word bug, I will investigate it.

Again, thanks a lot for your feedback and for trying the game!

[valrus]

I downloaded this a few days ago and have been playing during my commute, and I'm enjoying it.

In terms of progression/motivation, getting a high score wasn't particularly motivating, in that it didn't tie into anything else I was doing.  (The same way we don't pay attention to the score in old Mario games, because the addition of an end state made the score irrelevant.)  On the other hand, I found getting to the oil compelling, but too easy until about level 20.

I think the following structure would be worth a try:

• Rather than have rarer letters be worth more points, have them represent ores that you can use to upgrade your drill.  (Like, allowing five iron ores to upgrade the drill by one durability point, giving you one more turn on subsequent plays.)  That gives you some in-game motivation to utilize rare letters.
• Have levels be pretty long, such that you're unlikely to get to the bottom on your first try with an un-upgraded drill.

Since collecting ores is progress, it won't feel like such a sting to not-reach-the-oil; you're not "failing", you're just in-progress towards success.  But then when you DO finally reach the oil, it'll be more satisfying, because it took some luck, some work, and some word-smarts.  (Meanwhile, allowing drill upgrades means that less skilled players can, through hard work, still beat difficult levels eventually.)

I agree with Uncle Scotty that doing level select as a "map" of wells would be a nice touch.  (And with long levels that players attempt many times, it would mean you may only need four or five wells total.)

Some minor points:

• Diamonds were a little too easy to collect; as play went on I usually found my remaining turns rising rather than falling, giving me little feeling of pressure.  It might be worth a try to only allow the player to pick up a diamond when making longer words.
• My drill would sometimes make bad decisions about which way to go, and get stuck on rocks.  This wasn't really a fun kind of failure; I would rather just drill and not have to worry about what decisions the drill AI is going to make.
• My level unlock somehow got ahead of my play, so that every success unlocked the level two levels ahead of what I was playing.
• For visual clarity, it might be worth indicating wildcards somehow (like with an asterisk or question mark).  Having nothing meant that I kept getting having little moments of confusion between diamonds and blanks (thinking that diamonds, being blank, will give me a wildcard letter, or that blanks, being blank like diamonds, wouldn't count).

Anyway, good work; I'm following with interest!

[sAm_vdP]

Thank you SO much for your insightful feedback. You have seriously got my head spinning with new ideas for the game
Here's my take on the progression aspect: I still think the competitive game mode has it's place, BUT I love the idea of adding a second mode with more progression.

Ores a brilliant idea. I'm thinking they could be copper, silver and gold, each worth 100 times more than the one before and then the levels would have a ground-hardness that determines the number of moves (depending on the drill). This would allow the classic MMO/HacknSlay mechanics of exponentially increasing power (which is pretty addictive imho). And having a shop for drill upgrades and maybe different designs (not sure where hats would go) would be great.

I think I will add the possibility of sending challenges to your friends first (because it's a lot smaller), but then I'll definitely start working on this exploration mode.


Regarding your other points:

• The diamonds/emeralds really only serve a score booster in the current mode, they should be more scarce in the "new" mode
• The drill always goes down as far as possible. If there are two paths with the same depth it sticks to the middle. But maybe it should try to avoid the rocks more, I'll look into it.
• The unlock gives you the two levels after the last one you finished, the idea being that people can skip levels that might be too hard.
• Yes, you're the second one to notice the wildcards, I'll definitely change that in the next release.

Again, thank you soooo much for your help and thank you for following!

[valrus]

Ores a brilliant idea. I'm thinking they could be copper, silver and gold, each worth 100 times more than the one before and then the levels would have a ground-hardness that determines the number of moves (depending on the drill). This would allow the classic MMO/HacknSlay mechanics of exponentially increasing power (which is pretty addictive imho). And having a shop for drill upgrades and maybe different designs (not sure where hats would go) would be great.

If you do something like the wells-on-a-map level-select screen, I think it'd be funny to have hats on the wells.  Maybe that's what you can fight with your friends over; whoever wins gets to steal one of their opponent's well-hats.

[sAm_vdP]

You Sir, are a genius