This is in early stages, of course.

One thing that I always found disappointing in the word games on the market lately is that they almost all seem to ignore the meaning and context of the word. They reward long words over short ones, but they can't reward more appropriate and funny ones over boring ones...

I was also thinking of the great old show Knightmare (I'm NOT British, but I've seen video clips and heard about it from my other half) where the kids could have to yell "Spellcasting!" and then spell out, say, the word 'Freeze' in order to, obviously, freeze an enemy in place.

When I first heard about Dungeon Scroll, I was intrigued - I thought that perhaps you'd have to spell out something clever and appropriate to defeat the monster! But alas, it seems that's not quite the case (although the game tunnel review suggests that certain words do at least get special effects, which is cool.)

So here we have my take on the concept. All words are five-letter words (thus Penta-Graph), scrambled, with extra letters for each level of the dungeon you've descended (so it gets harder as you have more bad letters to sort through). And you have a clue, and you must solve the clue and create the correct five-letter word to win the combat. (Left click to select a letter. Right click to remove one you don't want.)

Between fighting monsters, you wander around an isometric dungeon (use the arrow keys or hold the mouse over the purple arrows) and occasionally turn up treasure chests with useful items - the Hourglass gives you extra time to solve a clue, the Candle will reveal one letter of the word you're looking for, the Potion will tell you the whole word and give you an instant win, and the Heart will be an extra life when it gets done.

Clear all the encounters on a level and you will face the challenging Boss Battle!

Obviously, with this design, I have to add tons of content instead of just dumping in a dictionary file, so at the moment there's only 70 words available, all starting with A. (You can even see them appearing on the menu screen!) I do have a huge list of five-letter words I'm sorting through, which is getting split into two categories (seriously advanced words will only appear in late dungeon levels) but it will take some time for me to process all that. :)

One-level concept demo: http://irc.wgp.org/users/papillon/pentagraph.zip

Interesting idea ... makes me think of Typing of the Dead and those cute fighting games based on tetris and bubble bobble.

A few ideas:

* Instead of all or nothing when it comes to guessing the correct word, divide the timer bar into five sections. With the first section being the longest, and the other four sections of equal size or getting progressively shorter:

0........1.......2......3.....4....5
|--------|-------|------|-----|----|

The timer starts at '0' and slowly decends to '5'. When the timer reaches '1', one of the five letters that make up the work will be randomly selected and given to the player. When the timer reaches '2' another letter will be randomly choosen and given to the player. This continues until '5' is reached.

When '5' is reached the player will receive the last letter in the work, but loose points/gold.

The goal is then to guess the word as quickly as possible: the sooner you do, the more points/gold you receive at battles end.

This will allow even poor spellers (like me) to enjoy the game more.

-AND/OR-

* Any wrong guess the player makes, will cost them points/gold. This will encourage the player to think before they click

-AND/OR-

*Have creature battles that involve having to guess more than one word (not all at once, but one at a time). This could be used to represent stronger creatures. Each time a correct word is guessed, the creature is "Knocked" back, the timer resets and the player is give a new word to guess.

--------------

I understand the game is in an early stage and you may have the above Ideas, and probably many others, already in mind, but having said that I hope the above suggestions help in some way.

David

I briefly played this an enjoyed the word game part, but not the walking through the dungeon part. What does that add to the gameplay?

From what I understood, you don't just have to find a way to exit, but you must battle all of the creatures to win. If that is indeed the case, then walking through the dungeon to confront all the creatures just becomes a nuisance.

When I design things, I like to strip out anything that doesn't add to the gameplay, and in this case I would either get rid of the dungeon bit or add some gameplay to it. It doesn't really seem to interface with the word game, something your post more or less promised.

Again, I may have missed something -- and I understand this is an early version -- but I just like to nag about these things :)

Actually, the kids who've been looking at even earlier versions of this are *most* excited about the walking around in dungeons part. They like it. It makes the whole thing feel less like a "boring puzzle game" (ie, the kind of game they don't play) to them.

So I have no intention of removing it. I'm certainly up for adding more to it, though - when I can think of things. (The one thing I do have in mind already is a merchant whom you can trade your points/gold to in order to buy more items, or vice versa.) I have some other vague ideas, but I'm worried about introducing too much 'unfair' randomness - traps, for instance, are very dungeon-appropriate but could be considered unfair to the poor puzzle gamer.

"It's Nethack meets Bookworm!"

I enjoyed it...

I agree that there needs to be alittle something more involved with the walking around part, but I am sure you have come up with some more ideas for this part of the game.

One thing on the promotion side, are you concerned about the game's pseudo-satanic overtones?
The name itself is likely to turn off some folks.

All in all, good game there.
By the way, what do you develop in?

Alex

I'm cheap and lazy - I'm still using GameMaker. :) Sadly, my college programming courses never gave us the first instruction on Windows, or anything with graphics, really... pure command-line unix C++/Java.

So while I'm sure I could eventually get the hang of a 'real' system, given some time to work on it, I don't really know where to get started. I have no idea how one uses C++ to draw a sprite on the screen and figure out whether or not it's colliding with another sprite.

GM neatly handles the basic engine things that I don't know, and then gives me a scripting language to control the higher-level things that I do know what to do with. I do wish it could make Mac games, though... :)

As for the Satanism aspect, I have thought of it, but I don't think it's too much of a concern - in my experience, the people who get seriously upset over the slightest hint of "witchcraft" are usually (although not always) also opposed to computer games in *general* and not the best audience. I'm hoping to make up for any loss by winning points with the geek crowd. I'm getting my sister-in-law, who is a much better artist than I am, to draw up level loading screens in the style of RPG interior lineart. (The current one is just me doodling in Flash.)

Sounds good..

Its not so much the aspect of spells/witchcraft that may cause a ruckus, but more the relation to pentagram and the like.
In any case, would love to hear how it turns out when released to the public ;)

Multimedia Fusion (www.clickteam.com) is, in my opinion, more powerful and about the same ease of us as Game Maker. MMF 2 will even support porting to Mac/PocketPC.

Alex

I've heard that MMF is actually quite *hard* to use if you already know how to program - that you can't do much writing of scripts and have to rely on lots and lots of clicking on different gui boxes to even set up a simple for loop. Plan to try it eventually to see how it works, though. Porting would be nice. :)

Im actually kinda excited about this game, on both the level of trying to merge rpg and puzzle game aspects as well as using Game Maker, which is really becomming an impressive application.

Have you thought about adding more rpg elements like experience, character classes, or "damage" ?

What the labyrinths should have is something like the Jehova room from "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" where you have to spell the word correctly to safely get across.

But more than just that, of course. There should be variations on the theme, and perhaps some more of the typical puzzle elements, the idea being to maximize the amount of action going on in the isometric view, without making it seem like the battles are the low point of the whole thing.

I haven't followed GM very close lately so I don't know what new language features are in, but I'm pretty sure that it could randomly generate things like that if you worked at it.

Ok after actually playing the game a bit, I have some feedback for you:

1) I really dont dig the whole Harry Potter theme - you could call this game Harry Potter Phonix...:)
2) The red dots in the map are really incogruous -- what if you replaced them at least with the icon of the monster you are going to fight? And on top of that, how about if they are moving a bit?

3) Adding some kind of treasure/powerups in the isometric view would be really cool

4) failing a battle shouldnt mean death, perhaps just some damage.

5) instead of the <word here> why not do the Mad Libs thing -- ___word here____ in the sentences?

6) be able to choose male/ female at the beginning -- girls might play this too :)

7) have some kind of magical effects when the player defeats the monster..

What Harry Potter theme? I haven't said anything about Harry Potter anywhere... Harry Potter did not invent wizards! This is a Nethack/D&D theme! :)

At the moment, the red dot can mean either a fight or a treasure (1 in 5 chance) - I think I'll split that off and have treasures appear separately, not marked on the map, so you have to roam to find them.

As you might notice from the menu screen, there *is* a female sprite being developed. :) She's just not done yet. (Remember, kids, I'm a girl!)

Many new ideas wandering around in my brain... If only I hadn't discovered Fairyland to distract me. :) (I never play MMORPGs, so I'm new to these silly colorful wastes of time...)

Bah, entire post eaten by attachment-too-big. Oh well.

Still in progress, screenshot of some new stuff:

http://irc.wgp.org/users/papillon/gui.png

And somewhere in the letter 'C' on adding words. :)

Ha, your guy went from looking like Harry Potter to looking like Fry from Futurama!

He sure did LOL! ^.^

Uh, he hasn't changed. THat's the exact same sprite.

*looks confused*