I just ran across a bug... if two words are anagrams of each other and both are given as options then you can (I did) pick the "wrong" one... I realise the chances are small but they might well be larger due to the way you pick the words and it happened to me (though the RNGod doesn't like me especially so...)
Just got "trail" and "trial" and picked the wrong fifty/fifty... happened two other times but I didn't spot the second of the anagrams... (I had already confirmed the word I chose had exactly the correct letters) out of five games which gives a rate of 20% of lives lost due to this bug and about 3% of problems posed - I got to an average of about 20 puzzles solved in each run.
TLDR; Great game, I've got suggestions and also how I "cheat" the game in case you want to make it harder! :D
I mostly looked at this to see if it was something that could help teach spelling to young children (especially given the icon) but the words I was getting (in terms of length) were rather intimidating even for me - although once I worked out how to game (see below) it longer words were easier!
For kids it would be great if you could limit the length of words (say have an option to limit words to a certain number of characters, say three, four, five or six for English... maybe four, five, six or seven for French, ditto Spanish and I'd guess four, six or eight for German - in order of how well I know those languages!)
For multilingual kids being able to pick multiple languages at once would be nice (and give larger word lists for when limiting word length).
And for Japanese kids (*wink*) Japanese would be nice! (I'm assuming you're using standard word / dictionary lists and I know those exist for Japanese, both all three "alphabets" and in just Hiragana (the primary phonetic Japanese alphabet that kids learn everything in first) so if that is true the only problem might be the font used but Hiragana is included in Unicode so if the font you're using is fully Unicode then no problem :) - oh, and, just to be difficult, Japanese word character limits would probably have to be two and three, maybe four but that includes a good chunk of all words! - Hiragana has characters for each consonant + vowel pair and so a single character codes for two letters in the English alphabet (Japanese call it Romaji), it's also why there are forty-eight (ish, long story) characters in the alphabet, many more than English, but only forty-eight sounds, many fewer than in English by a massive margin! :D
Cheating is achieved by; looking for letters above and below the "line" - b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, y - and matching the number between the anagram and possible solutions, if that doesn't produce a solution then look for other easily identifiable letters, e.g. i, o, and count their instances. Better to do it this way around since the high and low letters are rare and so more than one is almost always unique and combinations frequently so but the letters that are easy to recognise are often common and therefore require a full count so already eliminating some options reduces scan time... Why yes, I do enjoy theoretical optimisation ;) :D
Thank you for your time and effort, I look forward to playing more of your games! :D - Keep up the good work :)
Impressive detailed post! Thanks! Yeah, the game gets easier eventually, once you get the hang of it. Difficulty setting might be a good idea, as the Japanese and more languages, but I fear Japanese might be too hardcore for me as I'm unfamiliar with it besides a few animes :)
I'd be happy to provide advice but I'm a bit busy to contribute or do it myself... it's why I do what I can to help others - then I / we get to play the work of others in my "copious" spare time! :D
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I just ran across a bug... if two words are anagrams of each other and both are given as options then you can (I did) pick the "wrong" one... I realise the chances are small but they might well be larger due to the way you pick the words and it happened to me (though the RNGod doesn't like me especially so...)
Just got "trail" and "trial" and picked the wrong fifty/fifty... happened two other times but I didn't spot the second of the anagrams... (I had already confirmed the word I chose had exactly the correct letters) out of five games which gives a rate of 20% of lives lost due to this bug and about 3% of problems posed - I got to an average of about 20 puzzles solved in each run.
Great game though - still play regularly! :)
TLDR; Great game, I've got suggestions and also how I "cheat" the game in case you want to make it harder! :D
I mostly looked at this to see if it was something that could help teach spelling to young children (especially given the icon) but the words I was getting (in terms of length) were rather intimidating even for me - although once I worked out how to game (see below) it longer words were easier!
For kids it would be great if you could limit the length of words (say have an option to limit words to a certain number of characters, say three, four, five or six for English... maybe four, five, six or seven for French, ditto Spanish and I'd guess four, six or eight for German - in order of how well I know those languages!)
For multilingual kids being able to pick multiple languages at once would be nice (and give larger word lists for when limiting word length).
And for Japanese kids (*wink*) Japanese would be nice! (I'm assuming you're using standard word / dictionary lists and I know those exist for Japanese, both all three "alphabets" and in just Hiragana (the primary phonetic Japanese alphabet that kids learn everything in first) so if that is true the only problem might be the font used but Hiragana is included in Unicode so if the font you're using is fully Unicode then no problem :) - oh, and, just to be difficult, Japanese word character limits would probably have to be two and three, maybe four but that includes a good chunk of all words! - Hiragana has characters for each consonant + vowel pair and so a single character codes for two letters in the English alphabet (Japanese call it Romaji), it's also why there are forty-eight (ish, long story) characters in the alphabet, many more than English, but only forty-eight sounds, many fewer than in English by a massive margin! :D
Cheating is achieved by; looking for letters above and below the "line" - b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, y - and matching the number between the anagram and possible solutions, if that doesn't produce a solution then look for other easily identifiable letters, e.g. i, o, and count their instances. Better to do it this way around since the high and low letters are rare and so more than one is almost always unique and combinations frequently so but the letters that are easy to recognise are often common and therefore require a full count so already eliminating some options reduces scan time... Why yes, I do enjoy theoretical optimisation ;) :D
Thank you for your time and effort, I look forward to playing more of your games! :D - Keep up the good work :)
Impressive detailed post! Thanks! Yeah, the game gets easier eventually, once you get the hang of it. Difficulty setting might be a good idea, as the Japanese and more languages, but I fear Japanese might be too hardcore for me as I'm unfamiliar with it besides a few animes :)
I'd be happy to provide advice but I'm a bit busy to contribute or do it myself... it's why I do what I can to help others - then I / we get to play the work of others in my "copious" spare time! :D
Thank you for all your efforts ;)