Play game
Bound by Your Word's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #16 | 3.886 | 3.886 |
| Innovation | #48 | 3.657 | 3.657 |
| Fun | #66 | 3.629 | 3.629 |
| Overall | #80 | 3.524 | 3.524 |
| Game Design | #82 | 3.657 | 3.657 |
| Theme | #152 | 3.257 | 3.257 |
| Graphics | #304 | 3.057 | 3.057 |
Ranked from 35 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
In the game, you need to think of a word that connects to the END of some clues and connects to the BEGINNING of others. So quite literally, your guess is both the end and also a beginning.
Did you write all the code and made all the assets from scratch?
So close! Yes, ALMOST everything (including most code, all music and sound effects, all puzzle design and all vector art).
I did NOT create: 2 background photos, the font, and the Levenshtein-distance function implementation. Full credits are in the Settings screen of the game.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
Very interesting game! I was happy to play it for the second time. It's very nice that you actually encourage people to learn through your game. I was about to comment that automatic hints were taking the fun out of it, but then I saw that they can be turned off, so that's on me. I love when people do their own voice acting and the music is cool too. Good job :)
Oh and I'm also very curious about how you actually made it. Is it using some outside dictionary or did you have to think of all the possible connections to words? How does it know which words are connected?
Thanks for playing, and the constructive feedback! I created the ~90 puzzles (i.e. the "answers" and the "clues") manually while searching Wiktionary phrases and Google 2-gram data for ideas. Since I already wrote a website that parses that data, the data was already available for me to query. I mainly focused on ambiguous words with the hope that they would have a bunch of phrases (since they'd be used in a lot of contexts).
Thankfully I didn't build the list of partially-correct words manually :D. I wrote code that uses the 2-gram data to build the list of the top 500 strongest connections for a given clue, and builds that into the level data. Hope that helps! TremblingInferno had a similar question so there's a slightly longer response below in case that helps!
Good Job. some of the word links are a bit hard but that is good. Needs more levels
Thanks for the feedback! It's not obvious, but there's enough levels to play about 9 rounds. (About 90 puzzles.) I'll make that more obvious in a future version.
I really loved this silly and goofy game! Especially the story and also how you interpreted the theme! Wished there was more to that tho. The game was kind of hard and the UI & gameplay was hard at first, but I did got used to it. Another thing would be that people, that are not used to these kind of games like me or don't have english as their native language, have a difficult time guessing these words, something like a context clue (like in the tutorial one it could be like "a temperature") or some other kind of assist, but i think this could be expanded into a great mobile game, good job!
(Also it would be nice if you play my game too ^^)
Thanks for playing, and the feedback on context clues! One of the play testers had a similar suggestion, so you're not alone! I was hesitant to add the clues because I wasn't sure if I could come up with a good clue for each of the 90+ puzzles. But now that I think about it, ChatGPT (or similar) probably would be able to do the heavy lifting for me. I'll keep it in mind for a future version, thanks!
OK am going to play again lol. lets see if there are different words ! >_< !
That's awesome, thanks for sharing the love. There are about ~90 puzzles in the deck , and the game avoids giving you questions that you've already solved (except for a bug where you might see the tutorial puzzle an extra time), so you should be able to play about 9 times with unique puzzles as long as you use the same browser on the same computer!
And I don't know how you work that phrase into a conversation, but if you can, that's amazing. The Great Armening is only 199,089 years away and we need time to prepare.
lol HA HA HA this was Awesome - I LOVE word games so again I am biased here - but lets face it " the year is twenty eleventy twelve and pizza has grown arms " my goal for tomorrow work that casually into a conversation with out mentioning this game - then have everybody play this game lol - I got the words some with the hints others straight away - Nice voice acting too !!!
Pizza has grown ARMS! Man I love the story of this game, awesome job on the voicelines and everything. Also really cool gameplay, even though I barely got any words...
Who knew arms could cause such a commotion! Thanks for the feedback on the difficulty - you're not alone. I didn't have enough time to figure out and group the puzzles' difficulty, but I wish I had!
If you didn't make it to the end and want to see that short end-of-game cutscene, there's a cheat code "XRIGHTO" that basically acts like you typed the correct answer. So if you guess "XRIGHTO", it's like guessing the correct word.
Oh thats funny that there is a cheat code, I meant that I got all words with hints and made it to the end, but didn't barely get words without hints.
Oh! I get it. Thanks again for the feedback. Yeah, I needed some cheat codes to make test certain edge cases related to ending the game, and exercising each puzzle. :)
This game is both hilarious and giga-cool.
I loved the story parts, (voice acting was great!), well paced and very funny. The game itself was really enjoyable and hints were given when I got stuck (thank you!..).
Also I love the music track that plays throughout the game, caught myself head bobbing while thinking of words.
Great game, great entry. Thanks for the fun!
Good job, I like the game art style :)
would play my game and rate it according
LOVED the music and the story, a really fun game with soooo much character
Pretty amazing work here! I loved it! Well done!
pretty hilarious game, the theme does kind of fit the word system and the system is pretty well made
Nice game! Cool visuals and audio and the complexity of the word puzzles is impressive for a jam game!
The music is really, really well made. The story was definitely interesting. Well done!
I really love your game! The voice acting is stellar and the story is really funny. I also quite enjoy these kinds of word puzzles!
If you don’t already know it, The Mystery League has a lot of puzzles that remind me of yours. (You can find them here https://twitter.com/pzlr?lang=en)
Thanks for the feedback! I haven't heard of Mystery League, I'll check'em out. Thanks for the tip!
Yay I'm glad the absurd humor resonated! That kind of goofiness makes me giggle, and the giggles are what keep me building :D. I'm not sure how much you want to know about the word association stuff, but here's an attempt to answer! Sorry for the wall of text.
I think you're asking about how the game knows which answers are partially correct (checkmark vs cross)? That is largely based on the Google NGram dataset . The 2-gram data lists the frequency of certain 2-word pairs [as found in books], which can be used to figure out which word pairs have relationships or special meaning, relative to other words. Around 2020, I wrote code to slurp that up and make it searchable via my Dillfrog Context Search website (example) . So for the jam, I used my internal API to search that data and write code that "bakes" level files from my manually-generated list of correct answers and clues.
To generate the puzzles (i.e. the "inputs" to the baking process), I manually read through a list of "ambiguous" words that had multiple meanings , in the hopes that they led to more interesting contexts and puzzles. For each word, I searched Wiktionary (primarily) and my Dillfrog Context data (secondarily) to see what words might be recognizable clues. Then I created a TSV file that included the intended correct answers, and the clues to use.
Then, to build the JSON "output" that the game will actually read and use, I run that baking process. The baker slurps the TSV. For each clue, it uses that Google NGram data to spit out the top ~500 words that occur before or after each clue (based on a PMI score if I remember correctly...), so it can acknowledge the partially-correct guesses [for the top ~500 results]. It also adds correct answers that I missed (e.g. plurals, if I listed the answer in singular form), based on the top ~500 connections, and does some other cleanup.
Hope that helps explain it!
great game!
Awesome concept! This could easily fit into one of the Jackbox games with a multiplayer variant!
Fun to play! The hints really helped when I was stuck. Give my game a try!
Super fun game definitely my favorite from the jam so far. The voice acting was a really nice touch too and added a lot of feeling to the game. My only feedback would be maybe to make hints optional as I felt sometimes that I was given the answer before I was done guessing. Other than that great work :)
Thanks for the constructive feedback! Automatic hints are enabled by default because some play testers were struggling, but you can turn them off via the Settings screen. Maybe I should've exposed that setting on the main menu as well.
Ohhhhh, my mistake I must've missed that :)
The intro is great fun with excellent voice acting. The rest of the game was very simplistic, but I still had difficulty finding the correct words. This project was a great effort, and I really liked it even when it felt impossible to complete.