-
-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 92
Home
Often there are requests to add new features, and these come in the way of additional preferences. This was wonderful at the beginning of Lexica, when only a few preferences existed, but now it is becoming unmaintainable. Each new option increases the possible permutations available many tiems over, making it harder to test, but also harder to explain to users what the rules are and how their High Scores are captured.
Going forward, the goal is to design the notion of "Game Modes", whereby we hand-curate a set of preconfigured options using the preferences that are available. Perhaps in the future people could craft their own game modes too.
Unlimited time. Focus on finding as many words as possible at your leisure.
References:
References:
Don't allow the user to select words. Instead just show the words on screen so people can use it as a Boggle board.
References:
Restrict to only horizontal or vertical words, in straight order (mix of directions). Use bigger boards (8x8), use a crossword generator to make sure there is at least one word on each row/column. Absolutely needs the variant to limit to most common words, maybe limit to 500 most common words for this mode.
Basic+: Add diagonals (but do not require a word on all diagonals) and increase to more words, perhaps 1000 most common.
Works well with variant to find all words, and see how long time you used. Perhaps call it Primary School mode, to appeal to teachers to use it in class.
There are many ways that a subset of the most common words would be useful in different game modes. A clearly useful one is for beginners/primary school players. A middle way between just having the common words and the full set of all words would be to use both, list both the total and the common words during play, and after finished game show first a list of the common words and then a list of the hard ones (so group them, both the ones you found and the ones you did not find).
References:
We currently have a bunch of options which could be assembled in various ways to achieve game modes in one way or another. By keeping these in the backend, it allows simpler creation of game modes, and leaves open the notion of users-specified game modes in the future.
- Hint Mode: This simplifies gameplay, allowing more words to be found.
- Time: The longer time available, the more words can be found. Equally, the less time available, the more pressure you face.
- Scoring mode: Scrabble style (more points for uncommon letters) vs original (strictly just the length of word).
- Letter breakdowns: Showing the number of words left in each size simplifies the game (though it is broken in the new UI at time of writing).
While there are many good ideas floating around, some require a few too many changes to the core of Lexica. Implementing these would cause too much rework, and so it is recommended that if these are really desired, that a fork of Lexica is made to support the new formats.
Currently, all we have is a single number on the home screen, that mystically changes as the user changes preferences (until they realise it is tied to some hidden notion of a game mode).
The following should be implemented:
- Record the top X scores for each mode instead of just one.
- Allow the user to view the top scores (e.g. by clicking the "High score" area on the splash screen).
- Post game, the user should be told how their score fits into existing high scores. This could either be a new tab, or the default screen shown after a game - with the option to view details of the board, subsequently taking you to the current end-game screen.
References: