Great feedback, thanks! Sounds like I need to make the game rules clearer but hoping I can do that without explicit instructions somehow (it's a fun design challenge too). Let me know if you've got any ideas.
> 1. "?" is a wild card, right? (meaning it can stand in for any letter)
Yep! It'll autocomplete to a valid letter as you use it - there should be tons of valid 3 letter words so I was hoping people would figure it out with a quick bit of experimenting. Try just making up a long word to see if you can find one for big points (at the cost of the time it takes you to guess).
> 2. I once got a diphthong "qu" in a single tile - not sure if it was a glitch?
Yep, there's no "q" tile, only a "qu" tile to make it easier to spell something. Adding diphthong to my personal dictionary!
> 3. Why is a tile sometimes yellow?
Scoring explanation:
- Word scores directly depend on the length the word and goes up quick e.g. for a 3 letter word you get only 1 point (a deliberately lame amount), then 4 points for 4 letters, 9 points for 5 letters, 16 points for 6 letters, 25 points for 7 letters.
- The exception is yellow/bonus tiles are counted like they were two letters when calculating the word score, so one or more bonus tiles in a word grows the word score massively e.g. a 5 letter word using 2 bonus tiles will get you 25 points instead of the usual 9.
- You get rewarded a bonus tile if you spell a long word (this one for sure isn't obvious unless you play several games).
One of the core strategies is to earn a few bonus tiles with longer words, then make maximum use of them to level up by spelling words using multiple bonus tiles at once.
For the scoring, I was hoping for players to go through this thought process 1) "hmm, 3 letters words only give you a single point" 2) "4 and 5 letter words get way more points, and the score goes up rapidly by the length of the word" 3) "the bonus/yellow tiles boost the score up even faster". Sounds like this needs more work though so thanks.
> 1. "?" is a wild card, right? (meaning it can stand in for any letter)
Yep! It'll autocomplete to a valid letter as you use it - there should be tons of valid 3 letter words so I was hoping people would figure it out with a quick bit of experimenting. Try just making up a long word to see if you can find one for big points (at the cost of the time it takes you to guess).
> 2. I once got a diphthong "qu" in a single tile - not sure if it was a glitch?
Yep, there's no "q" tile, only a "qu" tile to make it easier to spell something. Adding diphthong to my personal dictionary!
> 3. Why is a tile sometimes yellow?
Scoring explanation:
- Word scores directly depend on the length the word and goes up quick e.g. for a 3 letter word you get only 1 point (a deliberately lame amount), then 4 points for 4 letters, 9 points for 5 letters, 16 points for 6 letters, 25 points for 7 letters.
- The exception is yellow/bonus tiles are counted like they were two letters when calculating the word score, so one or more bonus tiles in a word grows the word score massively e.g. a 5 letter word using 2 bonus tiles will get you 25 points instead of the usual 9.
- You get rewarded a bonus tile if you spell a long word (this one for sure isn't obvious unless you play several games).
One of the core strategies is to earn a few bonus tiles with longer words, then make maximum use of them to level up by spelling words using multiple bonus tiles at once.
For the scoring, I was hoping for players to go through this thought process 1) "hmm, 3 letters words only give you a single point" 2) "4 and 5 letter words get way more points, and the score goes up rapidly by the length of the word" 3) "the bonus/yellow tiles boost the score up even faster". Sounds like this needs more work though so thanks.