Letter-Setter News

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The first version of the game contained only movable tiles with letters. The letters were black, and the background was white - nothing could be simpler than that. It was very close to the prototypes drawn on paper, and, perhaps, I should have stick to that variant. Because simple games come hand by hand with simple art. But I wanted more…
I wish I had had a 2D artist at hand who would have been enthusiastic about the idea and would have agreed to work on the project on a voluntary basis. But I have found an artist with no previous experience in creating content for games who agreed to help me at the initial stage. So, the question was: what should we draw?

I imagined something meditative and calming: green grass, shining sun, some clouds and little birds...It were the birds that posed the biggest problem. I asked the artist to draw them, and then tried to digitize them manually. It all looked very strange, but I couldn't think of anything better - I meticulously drew every pixel of initial drawing scan. For want of any better word, we could call it some sort of pixel art. It took me some time, even more than I had spent on the first prototype, but much less than I had spent on compiling the dictionary (dictionaries were the real killers!). Anyway, those birds have determined the style of the game.
Backgrounds, pipes, bubbles, and clouds were drawn manually without any mock-ups, - having gained some practice when drawing the birds, I’ve got the hang of it, so new pictures came out easily. Of course, it was due to the simplicity of the style chosen, not the skill.


I wished I could say that the game was ready! But something was missing, and there was too much of something else:

• the picture turned out to be too cluttered: the letters were placed into colored bubbles (the color determined by the pipe color), marked with a point value, new words were highlighted, birds were here and there, and the scoring system was also present. It was hard to focus as attention was scattered.
  
• the playtests have shown that when trying to make up a long word, people move the letters sequentially (one tile at a time), and get very frustrated when unfinished words are destroyed within some other words. And nothing could be done with the desire to simply press on the letters to form new words, as it is done in most games (damn conservatives).
  
• at the beginning of the game, before all three-letter words are destroyed and crossed off the list of possible words, some letters were destroyed after each move, and the game was playing itself.
  
• progression introduced within Braille and Sign language learning modes was good to be seen in a standard mode as well.
  

And again, I faced numerous problems which had to be solved... When would I break this cycle and solve all of them?

I had to work it out!

The problem regarding the picture being overloaded could be solved by a real 2D artist with his artistic vision and sense of composition. But even without such we could do something on our own! The layout was cluttered, and there were some evident things to be withdrawn: the point values of the letters, as well as the bubbles coloring (it didn’t have much semantic load). Or should we combine these features instead of withdrawing them? Why haven’t I thought of it earlier? The colors will represent the point value of each letter, and its frequency as far as these attributes are related. Next came the field. Somehow, I have shrunk it significantly to make some room for displaying bonuses received. But in terms of time percentage, we actually spend most of our time looking at the board, not the bonuses! After all, that's where the game actually happens. Voila! Now we have a clearer emphasis, and the player's attention shouldn't be so scattered.
But still, something was missing, and I couldn't figure it out. So I gave in and started to look for a 2D artist. Since the game was almost ready, it was easy to make a detailed technical specification for outsourcing. All I need was to describe the game elements, break them down into assets, and make a list. However, it could have been even easier, if I had created the project documentation in advance. And so, in a couple of weeks new design was introduced, and the game was literally bursting with new colors.


But let's get back to the flaws of the core game mechanics - letter movement... With all due respect, I was not going to change it! It’s true that it is much more complex than what the player expects, but it's more interesting! It really is... One should give this game a chance to reveal its beauty: in a couple of sessions you will love it as much as I do. Or, maybe, in a dozen of sessions - you just have to wait!
I have added tutorial for you to learn how to play this game. It explains the way the author sees this process. The only problem is that people don’t like tutorials, especially in word games, where the basic mechanics implies making up words out of letters, or, in other words, something they learned long-long ago, in childhood.
I did my best, but I failed. The problem didn't go away. Should I have changed something after all? But this was the game's gimmick. So, instead of removing some features, I’ve decided to add some more. Besides, there were no limited-use abilities! And that’s why I have turned players' whishes regarding letter movement into such abilities that would change the gameplay. But these abilities have to be earned.

“Sniper” is an ability, allowing you to pick up letters across the field to form the word you need. It is some kind of a curtsy to other word games. Plus, it allows to bypass the game restriction imposed by the field size.
“Artillery” is a modification of "Sniper" that allows you to clear the entire field if being experienced enough and possessing a bit of luck: one can score up to 5 words out of the letters without moving the latter across the field.
“Devastation” allows you to clear the field if you don’t like the current set of letters. Considering that the field size is 9 x 5 = 45 letters, you must really dislike the set, if you decide to use this limited-use ability. But randomness is such a thing - "crap happens".
“Crossworder” - is a curtsy to crosswords puzzles and those people who have taken part in playtests and complained that the letters they moved were destroyed within words they were not going to make. In general, this ability freezes the field and allows you to move the letters as you like, and non will be destroyed. Doing so, you can shuffle the entire field and try to make the words out of ALL the letters. So to speak, you can create your own crossword. If the entire field is cleaned, you will receive an achievement and a crazy score multiplier!


Finally, two remaining issues were left – the lack of additional challenge in the standard game mode (no progression), and the notorious random generation of short words at the beginning of the session.

The solution to the first problem was inspired by a verbal word game called "Contact". It’s always hard to explain the rules of oral word games. Since more often than not, one needs to play it at least once to get the gist. That’s why I’d better explain the way this game is used in Letter-Setter.
It is used in a form of mini word-guessing game (quest) that starts with the announcement of a letter of a target word. One can try to guess what the word is, but there will be quite a few options. But don't give up: as soon as any word containing the known letter is formed, the neighboring letter of the target word will be revealed. Then, to get another hint, you need to form a word containing both known letters. And so on, but the order of the letters must be the same as in the target word. So it goes until the "encrypted" word is guessed. To motivate the players to play this mini-game, we should reward them for completing it. So, our limited-use abilities were introduced just in time!


And for the final touch, I was to add some more confusing rules to our mini-game! Because the player must suffer! Muahaha! Just kidding... Or am I?... I don't know. But something had to be done with the game playing itself at the beginning of the session. I had to block this feature at least temporarily and for those who want it. So, I introduced the following: when our mini-game is on the go, there is a limit on the minimum length of words and a couple of other restrictions (just to make it more fun), including prohibiting the usage of specific letters or starting / ending the words with a certain letter!
Of course, all tasks and restrictions are randomly generated, providing an endless replay value with auto-balanced difficulty.

Well, it’s you who will estimate how far I have strayed from the initial idea when working on the project, I will not comment it. But as a result, the game turnes out to be a pretty hardcore word roguelike with the ability to improve real knowledge and expand one’s vocabulary. Who knows, maybe someday such a genre blend will suddenly become relevant.


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https://store.steampowered.com/app/676320/LetterSetter/

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Having formed a rough understanding of what the game should look like, I began the prototyping stage. It took me less than a week working on evenings to make the first playable version of the game, and it included the following features:

• field generation. It incorporated Scrabble letter set distribution with its time-proven balance.
  
• tracking the completed words downward in columns and from left to right in rows. Several problems arose immediately:
  
  • firstly, randomly generated field contained finished words, so the game was playing itself without any help from the player;
    
  • secondly, multiple intersecting words could appear (the question was, which word should the game choose and count?).
    
• moving letters across the field. It seemed simple but happened to be challenging as the initially conceived tile-matching mechanics implied swaps of adjacent elements. In our case, it greatly complicated the long words composing process, when someone was trying to do it by moving letters from one edge of the field to another one.
  
• checking the field for the appearance of new words after each move. In addition to the above problems, there was another one: the letters the player preserves for future could be destroyed while several other moves were made.
  
• completed words destruction.
  
• addition of new letters in place of the destroyed ones. And again, we face the problem regarding the game playing itself.
  
• a scoring system for the letters destroyed. Grateful acknowledgements to Scrabble for the scoring system proven over time.
  
• local leaderboards.
  

But despite all problems and flaws in initial design, the prototype was playable and the gaming process could bring some satisfaction. But the problems were real and I had to be solved! Some of them were purely technical and turned into bugs, while others required a bit of work on the design.


At first glance, the problem regarding intersecting words did not seem to be a problem at all: chose the one that brings greater score, and you're good to go. But from a tactical perspective, the player may preserve some letters for the next move by destroying irrelevant ones within less high-scored words. To address this, I have introduced an additional step that allows the player to resolve disputed situations at their discretion, with the ability to disable this step in the settings.

The issue regarding moving letters across the field seemed more serious because the tile-matching mechanics did not work properly in our case! Surely, some kind of time-stop mode prohibiting the game from reading the words until all shifts of the current move are done, could have been introduced. But then it would be easier to abandon the idea of shifts and make new words by clicking the letters across the field.
Apparently, our concept, at the very least, required the ability to drag the letters from one side of the filed to another one. It does not resolve the problem completely, but reduces the number of moves needed to compose a long word.
When implementing the concept, I have tested the waters and came to the conclusion that by dragging letters from one edge of the field to another one, we also move all other letters on the way (they are moved as if we moved them one by one). That is, with the right skill and strategy, we can change the entire field in one move. And this solves our problem completely! Of course, there's much less of tile-matching mechanics left, but a bunch of other, more tactical elements, appear.


But in a word game, the gameplay is only half the battle. The core of the game is words, so we need a dictionary to work with. It was pretty easy to find the database to run some tests. However, it contained a lot of words that do not fit the category of common nouns in their singular nominative case. Additionally, it contained duplicate words and symbols from different languages left after digitization. Perhaps, today one can use ChatGPT to form the dictionary that meets such requirements, but back then, all the questions had to be solved manually.
One of the tasks was to make the game that supports multiple languages, but unfortunately, my knowledge in this area was not extensive. So, at the outset, I needed to add at least two languages: Russian and English, and provide the ability to add new languages in future.
To form a Russian dictionary, I looked towards two dictionaries – The Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language and The Ozhegov's Russian Language Dictionary. But there is almost a hundred years' difference between them, and the Dahl's Dictionary contains too many outdated words. Therefore, I limited myself to the Ozhegov's Dictionary. One more reason to limit myself was the necessity to select words manually, filtering out definitions and etc., and leaving only nouns that meet the requirements. My friends helped me with this work in their spare time. When dealing with one's native language, it's easier to detect common nouns in their singular nominative case. However, the situation with my English dictionary was worse. I have found an English dictionary similar to the Ozhegov's one, with plenty of words and descriptions, but it contained too many unfamiliar words, and it was exhausting to search for their translation in online services.

Time passed, and the work had to be done... The progress was slow and the task began to become tedious. What had to be done? That’s the point – we should let machines work for us! And yet back then ChatGPT was just a prototype, our fairly routine task had a certain sequence, which meant it could be automated!
Dictionary parsing follows a simple cycle:

• take a text line,
• split it into words,
• remove the words that have lready been added to the dictionary,
• remove the words that have already been deemed unsuitable,
• the remaining words are either added to the dictionary or marked as unsuitable,
• take the next text line.

It doesn't seem like something very complicated, but when it comes to analyzing several thousands of words, it appears to be a torment. So, I have written a program that executes this cycle. Therefore, human interaction has been reduced to sorting the words from the screen into two categories - into the dictionary or into the bin.
It seemed to be better and faster, but defining the words’ category was still time-consuming. And this could not have been automated; because the final choice was still up to the human.
To ease the workload even more, I have added hyperlinks to the program, so I could find translations and word meanings in case the word turned out to be unfamiliar. These hyperlinks simply opened the necessary link in a search engine or translator, but there was no need to copy/paste /type the text manually each time I bumped into a new word.
The work moved from a dead center and gained momentum! It was still time consuming, but it didn’t seem so unfeasible anymore - in a couple of weeks (not a big deal, yeah?) a small English dictionary was completed! And not only one, but two of them (I mean Russian and English). But I didn’t feel like incorporating some other languages thus far.

When forming a dictionary, I find this prosses to provide similar experiences to those experienced when playing games, and gained some practical utility as it helped me in learning and understanding the language. And the thought occurred to me: What if I add a small educational element to the game? Players may experience the same desire to find out the meaning or translation of the word they have formed. Since sometimes you remember a word you heard somewhere, but you have never searched for its meaning.
And I want to be clear here: I failed to eliminate automatic destruction of completed words. Unfortunately, people haven't learned to read minds yet, and the field is checked for composed words after each move. I didn't opt to add a full-fledged educational mode allowing to see the translation of a word into a target language and its definition directly in the game, because I am not my worst enemy. But it was easy to incorporate hyperlinks - the mechanism I used in a program forming a dictionary. Apparently, the result couldn't be called a full-fledged educational mode, but it eliminated the need to open the browser and manually type the word. Automation it was! The option to choose the target language and the preferable translator, as well as the search engine, was added to the game settings. And this is how a couple of dozen lines of code have opened the door to the world of educational games.

Then it was time to beef up the project a bit!


Firstly, we need to reward the player. Besides, we have already introduced a scoring system and the leaderboards. A quick brainstorming session resulted in a simple list of bonuses: for composing long words, for the number of words destroyed per turn, for the whole row or the whole column destruction, for destroying some part of the field (20%, 40%, ect.), for the whole field destruction. Ultimately, all of them were introduced into the game, because the more, the merrier: the player should be appreciated, inspired and praised.

Secondly, we should provide the player an opportunity to suffer. We have already incorporated a basic mechanics that worked well, and so it was time to add some modifiers that would make the gameplay harder. So, in addition to the existing "meditative" mode, where nothing restricts or spurs the player, we have added two other modes: step-by-step mode and limited time mode. The names of the modes are self-explanatory: they harness simple mechanics of limitations to enhance the gameplay variety. But this variety appeared to be unclaimed within the players, because they didn’t want to be additionally stressed in a game that by default demands from them to search for the words in a pile of letters and move the latter across the entire field, considering the best trajectory! Limited time mode designed to fuel tension didn't work it well either. So, unfortunately, both additional modes have not gained much popularity within the players. But if the player wanted to suffer, the game would provide this opportunity to him!

Thirdly, the player needs a set of tasks that form the game progression. But without understanding, whether the player is learning a language or just playing for fun, it's hard to assess his progress correctly, if at all possible. That brought an idea to add some other modes that would introduce an element of progression. I wanted to make the player learn something new (if he wanted it) and monitor his progress (welcome back to the educational mode). At first, I thought about Morse code learning mode, but I had to put this idea off as drawing dots and dashes in small square tiles designed for letters would not be an easy task, and the result would not be aesthetics. But the idea was so captivating, albeit deviating from the original concept of "advanced tile-matching word game" to an educational project, that it was soon followed by two other ideas: to incorporate Braille learning mode that focuses on a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired and Sign language learning mode that is mainly used by hearing impaired people.

At first, both modes completely replicated the functionality of the standard one, with letters substituted (as if another natural language was introduced). But if you are unfamiliar with the language, it's impossible to make up the words in it. And so, it was time to recall why had I started all this? Because I wanted progression! And both systems fit this aim perfectly, with the letters being opened gradually after several mini-quests on making the words containing the last opened letter of chosen mode are completed. Again, it can’t be called a full-fledged educational mode, but when new letters are opened, new neural paths are formed. So, it's a win, yet it is small one.


And then, with the game having gained the weight, it was time to define its appearance.

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/676320/LetterSetter/

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Sometimes, any developer (and if we look more broadly, not just developer) is sooner or later stricken with an idea to create something on his own.
It may be something "calm and cozy", or "educational". Or at least the tritest "something I can make money on". But more often than not, it's likely to be a little bit of everything.
Of course, it's not easy to embark upon the project. Because whatever your level of determination is, or whether you have years of development experience or not, lots of questions will always arise, thus making you doubt.

• What will the project be about?
• Isn't it too complicated? After all, it could take ages to implement it.
• Or, perhaps, it is too straightforward…
• Has nobody done such a project before?
• When will I work on it?
• Where will I find like-minded people to help me with this project?
  
• Or should I go it alone?

And so on and so forth. And many of these questions are indeed important.

But at some point, tired of brainstorming perfect projects on paper (or, to be more accurate, I did it mostly mentally), I decided to stop dreaming and take an action instead!

The first thing to do was to temper my enthusiasm and look at things more realistically:

• firstly, there was no point in tackling the "dream project"; after all, I wanted to see it through to the end;
  
• secondly, knowing myself and my communication skills, there was no point in gathering a team of pro bono volunteers right away;
  
• and, as follows from the above, the project had to be small.
  

Next came the stage of searching for an idea. All those projects that had been conceived many years ago flashed before my eyes… I looked through everything... literally everything...even if it was described by a single sentence... It was necessary to pick up something suitable. Finally, I have chosen to combine a word game with a tile-matching one. What a strange idea!

Such word-forming video games as Bookworm Adventures and Letter Quest: Grimm’s Journey came to my mind as references.

But they support only one language, and the rules of these games do not prohibit using:

• plural nouns,
• repeating words with different endings,
• adjectives,
• verbs, etc.

In my opinion, word games should be more like board games, where only common nouns in their singular nominative case are allowed.

Balda is a word game in which one should add one new letter in a turn to form a new word. The words are formed by connecting adjacent letters in any direction, except the diagonal one, and the word length determines the number of points scored. And this is where something similar to tile-matching mechanics is beginning to be traced.


Scrabble is somewhat similar to the previous game, but each turn one can add up to all tiles they have in their hand to form new words (and all words formed will be counted). The words are read left to right in rows or downward in columns. The greater the number of words and crosses is, the more points are scored (each letter is marked with a point value based on the letter's frequency). The way the words are formed makes this game similar to crossword puzzles. In fact, crossword is another word game that can be viewed as a reference, but it does not require separate presentation, as far as I can see. Anyway, all this suggests that in my game words should also be read left to right in rows and downward in columns.


Boggle is a word game in which players try to form as many words as possible using letters available on a square grid, within a set time limit. The letters used to form a word must connect horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. In terms of grid structure, Boggle is the closest variant to tile-matching games.


So, the idea was found, the references were studied, the mechanics were outlined, and it was time to get started! But brainstorming was on the go, and there was no way to stop it. At some point, I even had an idea to abandon the game board and tile-matching mechanics, and create something similar to Zuma, but with words.


However, that brought lots of questions regarding letters selection: it’s not enough to make a playground, you must be sure that there will be something to play with. In other words, the process of making new words must be manageable. In tile-matching mechanics the probability of possible outcome is greater, because the board incorporates greater number of letters and greater number of permutations.

There were some other ideas, but I made myself stop, closed my eyes and told: "I see nothing else", and that is how the search for ideas was officially finished!

In the end, I was to make a game taking place on a board with letters that incorporates tile-matching mechanics and simplified rules of reading – from left to right in rows and downward in columns. Somehow, it was an attempt to distract players from ordinary tile-matching by sophisticated mechanics, and provide them with a chance to wrack their brains.

Ultimately, this turned out to be a mistake in terms of attracting fans of tile-matching games, as the charm of such games lies in their simplicity: they provide relatively easy tasks and the ability to interrupt at any moment. In general, they are an easy way to increase the dopamine level... But easy ride is not for us!
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/676320/LetterSetter/