Lexicontainer
Lexicontainer is a brain bending word game puzzler where you're tasked to filling the board with given tetrominos forming words along the way. You get more score the more words you can make with a single placement but each time you fail to make one, your multiplier for the next one will increase introducing some risk versus reward tactics.
Made for Wowie Jam 3.0 in a weekend since I have to work on monday and can't utilize the last day of the jam at all.
Sources are available on GitHub.
Download
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Development log
- Mobile UpdateAug 12, 2024
- Dictionary UpdateAug 10, 2024
Comments
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Lexicontainer Gameplay
Oh boy, writing disorder nerfing me hard on this one
Nice, sometimes even very nice!
I like the randomness of it. The "words" it finds are so silly that it even does not matter that much that the algorithm finding matches is kind of buggy.
Huh, that's weird. That word definitely should be on both dictionaries.
I love this game but the cursor is WAY too big. It blocks my view of the letters. That is my only criticism.
Thanks! ❤️ Halved the cursor size now, hope that makes it better. 👍
Soooooooo much better thank you so so much!!!
always nice to see a new fun word game! Well designed and nice sound effects. I keep accidentally getting words, guess I need to play more of the classic mode, but enjoyed this! nicely done
DAMM how many word i didnt know.
jump scare noise when you lose damn that got me
SAME
The losing sound is too jarring
Easy, don't lose. I all seriousness though, I don't really like it either now that I listen to it after all these years. I'm doing a second patch for it today, maybe I'll do something to that sound effect too...
easy way to make mobile make settings and mobile mode (it just adds a keyboard that appears when clicked on)
Great concept - would love to play it with a few tweaks
- always show list of all words found, and don't progress past that page until player click so I can actually see what words I'm getting
- would personally prefer Oxford or Scrabble dictionary, currently it's counting a lot of "words" in a way that basically means i'm choosing random places instead of actually curating
Could totally see this being picked up by NYT games with those two tweaks
The original word list (ie. the classic mode) was this one (https://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/word-lists/) if I remember correctly so it should be along those lines but a lot of people were complaining about it too. I agree with you and don't really like how much non-words the current one has.
I guess showing the formed words would be a reasonable addition... 👍
I wouldn't mind having a little more player agency by allowing me to rotate the pieces. I read your comment on this from 3 years ago, and I feel like people would play by randomly placing pieces because they often don't have any other choice.
love this concept for a puzzle game! i'd like to suggest adding a way to control the volume of the music. i like to play this while listening to a video in another tab, but it's hard to focus on that when the music is constant and uncontrollable. also a lot of people are calling for an update in the dictionary, and i have to second that.
Obviously not a perfect solution but you can mute a tab in most browsers by right clicking the tab. Do you know a better dictionary that I could use instead the current one?
oh, I didn't know that about the volume mute thing, thanks!
which dictionary are you using right now? i thought it was listed somewhere but i can't find it
I don't really remember where I found this one. I've made several word games and every time I've searched for word lists for such, it seems to be the same few lists that are available. The other one I've used seems to be bigger one at least (4 megs in comparison to 2 that is used here) but also has more not actual words like 'xxx'.
i really wish i knew more about making games like these because it sounds like your options are pretty limited, but i wouldn't even know what to tell you to do about it T-T if this is the best dictionary at your disposal, that's totally understandable.
i guess my main issue with it was that there were several words that i didn't expect would be words at all, and sometimes when i check for a definition, there isn't one that comes up. learning the definition would help me remember the word and learn the dictionary you're using.
so if there were definitions for every word, that would really help me, though i can't speak for other people. and maybe if there was an option to click through definitions when multiple words are made at once? hope that makes sense!
edit: i really appreciate the non-conventional definitions, by the way. i like seeing a word i think i know, looking down at the definition, and seeing something i didn't expect. i always love learning new things, especially about language lol
It's not really that limited. Basically it just needs to be a list of words in any format really. An online tool like wiktionary wouldn't really work as it needs to check so many different letter combinations if they're a word each placement (6 checks in the most simple case of placing two 2x2 blocks next to each other) so it would become slow.
Yeah I like the definitions too. I remember testing out the game while I was originally making it seeing some unexpected word being made thinking "is that even a word" and that gave me the idea. Learning new stuff is great and if I see an opportunity to offer such in my games, I always take it. And that's why I show random definitions of the word too. Even if you know what you're using, you might still learn some new use case for the word. Even though as a flip side it seems to confuse some people to think it's displaying a "wrong" definition even though every obscure one is is pretty as legit as the common intended one.
Obviously having definitions for everything would be optimal but sadly it's not quite feasible. I'm just using a single source for them (https://dictionaryapi.dev/) and even though it has like all the "normal" words, it doesn't have everything. I don't think any source would. Even adding something like wikipedia/wiktionary wouldn't probably cover everything and would be a lot more difficult to fetch and format too. And of course AI could be of help too but would get a lot more complex to implement for such a small feature.
I would really appreciate a line break for the definition text. It often runs off the little game box in both directions. I also have questions about the dictionary, some of the definitions are non-typical. Like "nun", it mentions something abut it being the xth number in the alphabet.
Otherwise a very cute concept.
So the definitions are pulled from some API which I don't quite remember but I don't always use the top results to add some variety. And hey, you can actually learn something (interesting) by seeing some of the ones you probably didn't mean yourself.
Yeah, but...it defines "ate" as performing oral sex. Which is...not totally wrong, but....also kind of not right? Maybe a little more curation of which definition gets used is in order.
Also it recognized LNR as a word? (Which it didn't define.) Sometimes the challenge is finding three letters in a row that it won't call a word.
Yeah, that's the drawback of changing to a bigger word dictionary. And the definitions come from a different source so it won't show anything if such isn't found for the word. And it picks a random definition from the available different ones every time.
Not included words (reply with more):
a limit of only 9 characters for the name doesn't let me put in my username :c
WORDIs there any way to make the cursor smaller? The big ham hand makes seeing the letters nigh impossible.
Not easily at least. The size does depend on your screen resolution so the bigger the rez, the smaller the cursor while everything else scales proportionally.
I think it would be nice to update the cursor since it's a point many people are asking, and it really does get in the way of the letters
Amazing game, however, the word "raw" is not accepted. would it be possible to add this to the dictionary?
got 1145
Love this game, but in a word game like this dictionary is everything— and this dictionary really needs some weeding. Aside from a bunch of acronyms that shouldn't be included, I just put down a word short for raccoon and got the offensive definition "a black person." Also, yeah, sometimes the game just decides that you've lost when you haven't before you even see the next block. Again, I love the game— I just wish the dictionary was better.
the creator desperately needs to upgrade the dictionary
i love this! i wish the hand cursor was slightly transparent so i could see the letter under it, though
782 first try!
570th place aint bad, right?
i am number 721 on leaderboards
Nice game too, i like the graphics, the addition of a multiplier (you don't see things like risk and reward everyday), and the fact that it isn't laggy at all.
(edit: it's been 9 months since this was posted, and i'm now past 1,000 on leaderboards!!)
Looks really good but can't play in browser nor open the download on Mac!
youre using a non-unitywebgl browser
on your system you've probably not tried
Right, got it working! I do think rotation would be useful re: words, and choice over which word it picked. Very interesting concept though and loved the graphics, would love to see it taken further. Another thing-- it somehow didn't accept "pan" as a word, which was confusing
EDIT: Weirdly enough, PAN worked fine another time.
I turned on WebGL dev features on Chrome, that enables WebGL.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Great game! I saw this in the full video of the entire livestream, which contained the most popular games from the jam, on Jonas Bonus. (Jonas' second YouTube channel.) I was immediately attracted to it. I played it as soon as I could, and was pleasantly surprised at how well balanced and fun to play it is! Good job to whoever developed this!
-RandomGeneratorCodes
Unity Game Developer
Thanks! ❤️
I feel like the game is almost too random? Since you have only one piece and you can't rotate it, You can get "useless" pieces all the time. On the other hand, if you go for the "risk-reward" system with combo, you can get a piece which contains a word by itself and It'll get counted no matter what. I think that having two, three slots with blocks that you can pull from would make the game much more strategic in nature.
Yup, you are very much right! I'm afraid that block rotating would make it too complex, quite a few people already said they just played it by placing blocks pretty much not considering the letters at all. Of course it was a jam game and some people don't really have the patience to play the games properly and just mess around with em for couple of minutes so that isn't something to really cater the game around though. But having a kind of block "hold" has been suggested and is pretty much exactly what you described too. I think that might be a very nice addition here. I guess I'll have to try these things out.
Thanks for playing and the feedback! ❤️
Uh-oh. I didn't think I'd get on the leaderboards... and, uh, you can probably see why.
is there a way to rotate pieces?
No, for now at least.
nice game but i wish the game over sound effect didnt make me jump all the time
This is such a high quality game! Amazing work!
you could make a portuguese version? I am brazilian but I know a little of english
If I make a post jam verison, of course! I already have dictionary for it too from making other word games.
Well made game, i'll rate it in the jam section.
Wow, great game. The definitions of the words sometimes are too long and go outside the screen (web-version), but that's just a minor issue. Well done ^^
That's super polished! I loved your game.
Fun little word game. It takes a bit of getting the hang of, regardless of how many games you play. I enjoy it for its challenging difficulty and trying to put some strategy into it.
Hiii, I've made a video about the game and wanted to share some feedback about it :D, hopefully it helps :)
-The idea/main concept of the game is very very awesome and original.-The gameplay mechanics are simple but very good and fun, I especially liked the fact that the game explains the meaning of the words you make.
-Visually the game is really well done.
-I like the fact of having that ranking as it encourages the player to keep playing to improve and get higher on it.
Hopefully this is useful to you :D, also if you could subscribe that would help me a lot :)
Regards
The 'Game Over' sound startles me every single time o-o; Nice game!
wow 3rd place
BTW it is still cool game