Babel - a cross between Tetris and Scrabble

[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

[Ulydev]

You're on a gamedev spree!

[master both]

So many games! Are you warming up for Ludum Dare?

[georgeprosser]

Have updated Babel to improve the controls after some great feedback from another löver! You now click and drag to make words.

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).

[whitebear]

This would be very cool on mobile. With bottom of the screen holding virtual left and right keys and touch drag for words.

[davisdude]

I was thinking the same thing, except with the bottom being a swipe area for changing the block instead of using buttons.

[steVeRoll]

This is really cool! This is probably off-topic, but where did you get the dictionary file from?

[georgeprosser]

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.

[Daniel Eakins]

Interesting but hard! My best score is 113

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

[georgeprosser]

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.