itch.io

First of all, congrats on building the game to what it is now!

In short, I liked the core game. There are rough edges to polish: teaching the player the game, audio-visual feedback, UI, bugs. These can be improved over time. There does seem to be promise in the word board-based battle mechanics, which differentiates this game from “Slay the Spire”.

Here are some points that I could think of, which I hope will help you in some way to improve the game. You may not agree with all of these. Use them as you see fit.

• Learning to play
  • The main resource to learn to play the game is the pdf tutorial. Overall the tutorial does a good job introducing the gameplay. However, there are some points that I couldn’t get from the tutorial, and had to learn by playing the game.
  • On page 2, the tutorial mentions “One word per turn”. But this only means you can submit (or encash) one word to get action points to use on this turn. You can spell multiple words and save them to the lexicon though.
  • There are hover tooltips available for the word board (Blessed, Charmed, etc.), and for enemy modifiers (Strength, etc). It would be good to have similar tooltips for the various enemy stats, intent, action points indicator, etc.
  • Tooltips for the cards would also help. “Replace 3 Neutral tiles with Shiv tiles”. “Deal 6 damage + 2 per positive tile destroyed” What are Shiv tiles and positive tiles? I learnt by playing.
• The core concept seems novel: a mix of word building and deck building battle.
  • The overall game structure follows that of “Slay the Spire”. The “Bookworm” part lies in the core game mechanics. It is here that the game brings in some novel ideas, and differentiates itself.
  • The interactions with the board are interesting. These are some of the cards that I thought were fun.
  • “Slash” and “Greed” provide damage by destroying cells, but then these cells become unavailable for future scoring.
  • “Fireball” damages multiple enemies in an area, but also creates a burning tile that will damage the player.
  • Enemies “Slime” cells, which cause damage to the player when words containing these letters are formed.
• Balance and General Fun
  • I liked the interaction with the word board. Specifically the actions noted above. I think more development in this direction would be good.
  • The bugs, and to some extent the UI and feedback elements (see below) did reduce the fun in the game.
  • The initial levels were easy to cross. I couldn’t proceed too far into the game without encountering a crash or getting stuck. So I can’t comment on overall balance.
• UI
  • The UI and art has a professional look to it. The hex word board in particular looks very good.
  • After a word is constructed on the board, it would be easier if there were a set of buttons: “Submit”, “Save”, “Cancel”, etc, in place of the current: “Hold Left”, “Right click”, etc. There is a “Save” button in the Lexicon, but I feel this should be next to the board instead.
  • Same after selecting a word from the Lexicon: “Submit”, “Cancel”.
  • After a word is submitted, my understanding is the player can’t do anything else on the word board this turn. So maybe disable the word board.
  • Lexicon should have a scroll bar to drag, rather than clicking and dragging on the words themselves.
  • Since the enemies are all shown on screen, it would be nice to have a player character on screen as well. Without this, it appears like a first-person perspective. Maybe this is the idea, but I’m not sure it suits the game.
  • The size of enemies on screen, and their stats like health, etc. could be a little bigger.
  • The stats bars and other icons around the enemies seem to be proportional to their size. This makes the stats for smaller enemies harder to read. The icons around the enemies could all be made the same size, independent of the enemy.
  • Some background music in-game would be nice.
• Visual/Audio feedback
  • There is good sound feedback when clicking on letters to construct a word. In particular, the feedback when a word is submitted is satisfying.
  • As a word is being constructed on the board, I’m not sure if there is any feedback telling me whether the word is valid or not. This would help. Right now the feedback happens when I attempt to save the word.
  • No direct feedback when a word is saved to Lexicon. As of now the word definition is displayed.
  • No audio feedback for playing an action card, end of turn, attack, enemy death, etc.
• Title
  • I like the current title: WordBinder.
• Bugs
  • These bugs occurred randomly. But enough times that I couldn’t proceed beyond 4 or 5 levels.
  • Upon clicking end of turn, the game got stuck without proceeding, or crashed.
  • Upon right clicking to save a word, the game crashed.

Hope this was useful. All the best for your game!