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[sonictooth]

Hello everyone!

I am a beginning game developer and I'm prototyping a multiplayer word game tentatively titled "Worduel". The idea is very simple: you and your opponent take turns spelling words, and the first who runs out of time loses (more detailed instructions are in the actual game page). It's currently an HTML5 browser-based game, and I'd love to have feedback regarding the core game idea - I know that the, ehr, "production values" are actually quite low, but I would like to know if the basic concept is fun.

http://www.worduel.com

Thank you!

[Nebjezus]

Great little game you've made. There were a few things I noticed while playing, that are probably more relevant later on in development, but here's what I got:

-It was a bit unclear as to when it was my turn to enter a letter. Because the game is all about reaction time and quick thinking, you need all the information to be delivered to the player as quickly an effectively as possible. This is definitely something to keep in mind when designing the UI.

-It was unclear that hitting the space button reset the word. Again, I think this comes down to making sure that all information that is important to the player is being conveyed effectively and concisely.

I'm curious as to what platform you were planning on targeting? I could see this working as an online-based mobile game, though with having it on line you run the risk of latency, which will in turn undermine the response time required of the player. Perhaps it could work as a local multi device game? I'd be interested to see a prototype of that.

Look forward to seeing more of it.

[sonictooth]

Thank you for playing the game, and for your thoughtful reply!

I know that the game's presentation is currently far from perfect: I need to find a way to communicate the rules more clearly with visual cues (and probably something like a tutorial), and that's actually much harder than I initially thought. (I also learned that *no one* reads instructions, no matter how short they are.)

As for the platform: yeah, the ultimate goal would be to make it work as a mobile game. The latency will surely be a problem, but the lag would only affect the visual presentation of the game and not the game itself: i.e. you might see the orange bar jump backward or forward before the beginning of your turn, but your time left will always be the "right" one. (This is because the time that the user employs is calculated by the client, not the server, and as such it always reflects the time that the user has actually taken to type a letter. Of course this allows malicious clients to lower their reported times, but there's very little one can do about malicious clients anyway.)

I'll consider starting a devlog as I go further with the development. It's not a typical TIGforums game since it is more "casual" than most, but I think it faces basically the same challenges as "traditional" games do.

[Nebjezus]

I think with a game like this, you wouldn't really need a tutorial in the traditional sense. Games like Words with Friends have such a clean, simple presentation and mechanics, that it really only takes a few well designed elements within the UI for players to get the gist.

Keep in mind that while the actually numbers behind the visuals aren't going to be affected by the game, the player isn't going to see those, they're going to see the UI representing those numbers.

Casual doesn't necessarily imply simplicity, at least not in terms of design. Look at a lot of popular casual games like Bejeweled and Farmville and you'll find those games we're built upon fairly complicated and well thought out systems.