I need help with design issues in a word(ish) game

March 22, 2024 8:16 AM

Being a fan of Little Alchemy and then learning about Infinite Craft on the blue, I thought I'd take the next logical step - add a subtraction mechanic and make it goal-based daily game. I've gotten a little feedback so far but I'm looking for some thoughts on common issues.

The main issue has been a phenomenon we're calling "mud lock" where the player gets seemingly close to the goal word, let's say "swamp", but they end up dancing around it just getting a similar word like "mud" repeatedly. This kind of thing isn't an issue with IC where there is no defined goal other than to have fun fiddling around. I'm not sure what can be done about this other than playing a constant game of wack-a-mole in the database when a word is too often generated as a combo.

Other things I'm curious about:
1. Do you feel the instructions are adequate? Some people who have never seen IC were quite confused but I don't know how to further simplify the instructions
2. Do you find any visual elements confusing or unintuitive?

BONUS for those with backend dev experience:
3. What would your ideal db structure look like while maintaining decent latency? I feel like I'm committing a crime by keeping the combos in a kv store...

Thank you for your help!
wordsfordays.com

posted by holdmusic to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

Nice idea and aesthetic!

The instructions were clearly written but I found the game confusing.

I've made planet, satellite, moon, orbit, solar system etc so it feels like the goal word (gravity) should be right within reach, but I keep bouncing around. Is this "mud lock"?

Should subtraction be the inverse of addition? If I add orbit to orbit I get space, but if I subtract orbit from space I get void.

Are the emoji significant? Sometimes solar system had 🌌, other times it had🪐.

I didn't like having to go back to the panel to choose between addition and subtraction. I wanted to drag something and then add or subtract. Maybe it could work like this? With the plus and minus appearing when the cursor (holding fire) gets close to dropping it on earth.

Another option is left drag to add, right drag to subtract - not sure how that could be adapted for mobile tho.

Does it need a backend at all?

I noticed it's making a HTTP request on every addition and subtraction. Unless you have a truly incredible number of words, the relationships could be stored on the client using an appropriate, efficient data structure.

The client could also generate a word for the day (random, but same for everyone) using the (UTC) day as the seed. Duotrigordle uses the Mersenne Twister RNG algorithm to do this.
posted by Klipspringer at 8:53 AM on March 22

I don't know anything about Little Alchemy or Infinite Craft, but I like word games.

I find it visually appealing, nice and clean - and (important for my personal accessibility needs) with nothing that moves without my involvement. I find the concept clear and easy enough to understand. But my first reaction is that I'm at a loss as to how I can combine tangible things like "dust" and "water" so as to eventually end up with "gravity". I can't conceptualise gravity as a combination of two other nouns. It's fun seeing what pairs combine to form what, but even after playing for a while, I haven't worked out a plausible route to the target word. So I understand the rules, but I don't think I'm going to reach the goal.

Other thoughts (somewhat disorganised, sorry):

I assumed that actions would be reversible: I added "earth" and "water" and got "mud", and I thought when I subtracted "water" I would get back to "earth". Nope, "dust". Not that it actually matters - earth and water are still right there in the word list! Just a moment of surprise that you might not have intended.

Conversely, I'm pleasantly surprised (and amused!) that I can combine the same word with itself and get a different word back. And the result of subtracting a word from itself seems wholly fitting.

I'm on a full-screen (1920 x 1080) desktop browser. I'm a bit puzzled that the play area is so big and the word list area is so small; I only need enough room to combine two words in the play area, and the list is going to keep on growing. Makes me think I've misunderstood something after all: perhaps there's an advantage to positioning / creating lots of words in the play area?

Search on the word list is nice, but I'd also like to be able to choose to sort the words in the list alphabetically or by time of creation. Perhaps also a randomise option, for inspiration!

It would be nice to have access to a history of which pairs I've combined and what resulted from them. Maybe that would help people avoid mud lock, if one contributor to it is the player accidentally repeating combinations?

When I left it for a few minutes and then came back, I'd forgotten I'd switched to subtraction, and was confused when my next action didn't work. Maybe the add/subtract should be on the main playing area, or should set something visual in the playing area as a cue (a background pattern?) - or a plus or minus icon should appear for a moment when you perform your action? But you can't undo an action, so maybe not that one, as it's already too late by the time you've done it.

... perhaps an undo would be nice, or a "no wait, I meant..." change-last-operator button.

I ran into one emoji that didn't work for me - the one on "dirt" is showing as a hollow rectangle.

The hover highlight on the currently selected operator is more pronounced than the one on the unselected one. Combined with the fact that the operator tiles don't depress on hover the way the word tiles do, it's not as obvious as it could be that the unselected operator is clickable.

Some word pairs can't be combined. Most can, but sometimes there's a pause long enough between dropping a word and seeing the combination happen that you start to think you've picked a pair that don't mix. I presume that's because you're sending a network request each time, and sometimes the response takes a while.

I might find I have more thoughts later, but I'll stop there for now, at least. It's a nice toy!
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 9:50 AM on March 22

First note: if you can remember the state of my game when I go away and come back, surely you can remember that I turned the sound off.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:41 AM on March 22

I'm finding the language joining to be pretty non-intuitive in a lot of cases. Day + Day = Night? Day + Sweet Dreams = Nightmares? Night + Star = Day? I can sort of see the latter one, in that Night + Sun might equal day and the sun is a star, but it's unexpected and it makes it hard to try to get where I'm going.

I did eventually get to gravity, but it felt pretty random and like even when I was working in the right direction, I wasn't getting results that seemed like what they should be.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:48 AM on March 22

I like the idea of a target word. I've played several of this type of game and they're fun, but I get a bit bored of just randomly combining without a goal. It would be nice if players could still access the board after "solving" it, though. It feels a little punishing for it to go "Congratulations! Bye!" and the better/faster you solve, the more abrupt and weird that would be, imo.

I'm not sure, though, what difference the "subtraction" mechanic makes. I mean, I can see that you get different combinations with subtracting v adding, but I didn't really feel like there was an obvious reason to use one vs the other. Possibly that was explained in the instructions, but I skipped through them because I'm impatient and then couldn't access them again after I'd found the target word.

I really like ManyLeggedCreature's suggestion about randomizing or reorganizing the word list. That might help with getting stuck on the same combo/result over and over, as well. The longer the word list gets the easier it is for the player to miss good/productive combos and just go back to the same set of words repeatedly. It's the primacy-recency effect. Another way to do it might be to take advantage of the large play area and let the ingredients remain in play instead of disappearing once they combine.
posted by radiogreentea at 11:17 AM on March 22

I'm playing it now. I like the aesthetics and sounds. I found it confusing to start. I thought I had to tap a word, hit plus, and then tap another word, like the directions show. I didn't know I put them on top of each other.

Also, I thought it was a word game, but it's really a concept game. (I thought I was going to make compound words when I first saw the thing about combining words.)

Also, I have no idea of how to get to gravity, and I'm not sure the words are being used consistently. It would be nice to see what I've combined (like, show me the equations I've made on this nice attractive checkboard). But "earth" seems to mean "soil" here. And why does wind + wind = breeze? I think wind maybe means movement?

I am about to give up because I have fiddled around with it and have no idea what path to take. Could you add hints? Give some definitions? I don't know.
posted by bluedaisy at 11:31 AM on March 22

I like it! I didn't have the "mud lock" issue, so I can't help with that.

I've played Infinite Craft for a bit, so the game concept was clear to me even though things (literally) don't add up. Maybe that's worth adding to the instructions? For instance, "spread" plus "water" makes "rainbow", but "rainbow" minus "water" makes "light".
posted by demi-octopus at 11:48 AM on March 22

Okay, I saw the comment after mine where the person got a verb so I went back and tried more. I have no idea how I got some of the words that I got, and I did get gravity, and I just don't really understand why.

It would be nice if I could see the words I added together to get to gravity.
posted by bluedaisy at 11:58 AM on March 22

Oh, wait, you do show this. That's helpful. I'm still not sure what I learned that would help me play it again. I think I still struggle with very different uses of the one word "earth."
posted by bluedaisy at 11:59 AM on March 22

It would be nice if, on the win-screen, you could at least optionally see just the shortest path you took from the starting words to the goal, or, if showing all the combinations, to highlight those that were on that path.

I found this tough at first because I kept trying to get to gravity from celestial things. ("Falling star" minus "star" looked so promising!)

And then I kept trying to get a waterfall from hydropower or dams to no avail.

Finally realized water + mountain might get there.

And from there I could subtract "water" from "waterfall" to finally get "fall."

And then "fall" + "solar system" did the trick.

So in the end everything clicked into place with a good sort of logic, and having subtraction available really did add something to the process.

(It might also be nice to have quick/easier access to the last few things you've combined/used.)
posted by nobody at 12:25 PM on March 22

Wow, my path was super different from nobody's. I had something about ... press and earth? I didn't get fall or solar system or planets or stars.
posted by bluedaisy at 1:13 PM on March 22 [1 favorite]

Okay, after trying this out for a couple more days (and stopping midway on the third day), I think the issue is less about "mud-lock" the way you've described it (a word being produced over and over), and more about what felt to me like cul-de-sac traps, where a small group of words keep producing each other.

Yesterday, for example, I ended up in a cul-de-sac where combinations of things like warrior, sword, battle, epic, and legend were just feeding back into each other (with warrior + sword really feeling like it ought to have successfully produced "knight" (yesterday's goal word), but instead producing something like "battle" again.)

(Eventually sword + honor reached chivalry, and then chivalry + warrior did the trick, but the process leading up to that discovery felt less like puzzling through an interesting problem, and more like an unpleasant slog.)

This feels harder to solve than "mud-lock" the way you've described it, and I haven't come up with any suggestions, but figured I might as well type this out anyway in case the cul-de-sac framing might be useful.

Oh, a similar frustrating thing that's probably closer to your original mud-lock framing, is how certain words seem to lead to another particular word nearly no matter what you combine it with. "Emergency," for example, seems really stuck on leading to "911," and "anarchy" seems really stuck on leading to "chaos." (I'd probably remove "911" from the database entirely, if possible.)


(And, lastly, something else that I didn't think about on the first day, but did start wondering about yesterday and today: in subtraction mode, which word is getting subtracted from which? The order does seem to matter, but unless I missed it, I couldn't tell from the tutorial text which word comes first in the equation, the one you're dragging or the one you're dragging onto?)
posted by nobody at 8:07 AM on March 24

I've found two words so far which keep popping up as a result of different combinations: "clay"/"pottery"/"ceramics" (these seem to loop) and "success" (kind of ironic, actually).

It almost feels like once I've found them, they're more likely to pop up again?
posted by demi-octopus at 8:54 AM on March 24