Word Factory

Edited February 14, 2023

Another of the 20 2020 jam games. This was a fast one to make, but I think it's actually pretty fun to play. Click the title up there to give it a shot!

Original devlog / postmortem:

I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try one of the three-hour TriJams that kept going by in the jam feed. Word Factory is a super quick game about recalling and typing words under time pressure and with constraints.

A couple of years ago I participated in the STDIO jam and made a game called Word Wizard, which was pretty similar to this. It would tell you you were facing an [adjective] monster, and you had to cast spells (words) that started with the same letter as the adjective. The longer the word, the more damage it did to the monster, and the quicker the fight was over, the less HP you lost. You couldn’t use the same word twice in one game. It was written in PHP and played from the command line, though, so I couldn’t figure out a good way to make it playable online.

This is essentially that game, but with a real-time clock to beat, and with additional constraints on the words. And some annoying sound effects. I should probably have spent that time trying to make it funny, instead.

I’m building up a good supply of Javascript functions to reuse in these things. That was pretty essential to getting this done so quickly.