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Babel - a cross between Tetris and Scrabble

Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2016 6:10 pm
by georgeprosser
Hey again! My 3rd game in 3 days...

Babel is a word game, sort of like the lovechild of Tetris and Scrabble. You have to build words to prevent the falling letters reaching the top of the screen.

You can play it here https://gprosser.itch.io/babel

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Re: Babel - a cross between Tetris and Scrabble

Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2016 9:19 pm
by Ulydev
You're on a gamedev spree!

Re: Babel - a cross between Tetris and Scrabble

Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2016 11:02 pm
by master both
So many games! Are you warming up for Ludum Dare?

Re: Babel - a cross between Tetris and Scrabble

Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2016 7:21 am
by georgeprosser
Have updated Babel to improve the controls after some great feedback from another löver! You now click and drag to make words.

master both wrote:So many games! Are you warming up for Ludum Dare?
I suppose so! I had no idea it was coming up so soon. Haven't been able to take part in ages (I've had a busy year).

Re: Babel - a cross between Tetris and Scrabble

Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2016 9:34 am
by whitebear
This would be very cool on mobile. With bottom of the screen holding virtual left and right keys and touch drag for words.

Re: Babel - a cross between Tetris and Scrabble

Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2016 2:40 am
by davisdude
I was thinking the same thing, except with the bottom being a swipe area for changing the block instead of using buttons.

Re: Babel - a cross between Tetris and Scrabble

Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2016 5:58 pm
by steVeRoll
This is really cool! This is probably off-topic, but where did you get the dictionary file from?

Re: Babel - a cross between Tetris and Scrabble

Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2016 7:40 pm
by georgeprosser
steVeRoll wrote:This is really cool! This is probably off-topic, but where did you get the dictionary file from?
Think it was the pocket dictionary from this page http://www.puzzlers.org/dokuwiki/doku.p ... #058;start

Because I was lazy I implemented the dictionary using an actual lua dictionary (it's a table but whatever, it works like a dictionary), which made lookup really easy. I wrote a quick python script to print out all the values in the dictionary file in the necessary form (dictionary['aardvark'] = true etc.). As a result the dictionary size was limited by the maximum number of globals available in lua, so I used the 'pocket' one.

Re: Babel - a cross between Tetris and Scrabble

Posted: Sat Sep 03, 2016 9:23 pm
by Daniel Eakins
Interesting but hard! My best score is 113 :cool:

For some reason two-letter words don't work though.

Re: Babel - a cross between Tetris and Scrabble

Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2016 11:21 am
by georgeprosser
Daniel Eakins wrote:For some reason two-letter words don't work though.
I ruled out 2-letter words because they are too 'guessable' ie. you can just try a whole bunch of combinations very quickly and find words without knowing what they mean. It's very hard to lose the game when UT, XU, EN, BO are words.

I think I probably should have communicated this to the player a bit better though.