No matter what I tried, the latest Shoebox Word game just felt way too easy.

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Yesterday, I decided it wasn't working in the way I was planning, so I've decided to shuffle the gameplay around a little.
Rather than simply tapping a letter, and it being fast-paced and a furious dig through the word-mine, it's now become a little more "Rack of tiles" like.
The word tower's still there, and you've still got the little cow and the letters to smash, but now there's a lot more wordplay in the game, and things feel a heck of a lot better as a result.

Honestly, this game's gone through a number of evolutions since I started working on it, but it now feels much more like a proper Word game than what it was earlier.
Less frantic, more thinky!
I'm still going to add time-based scoring into the game, mostly because the "normal" scrabble scoring isn't really applicable here. After all, the words are pre-chosen, so you don't really ever get "better" words, so can't ever really score more or less than the predetermined words would ever score.
As a result, timer-based stars will likely work better.

I need to account for "time to think" as well as "time to shuffle", but it shouldn't be too hard to play around with the timer to get that working well enough.
I'll try to be as lenient as I can with it, to ensure the timer isn't too evil, and you can still chill whilst playing it.

My main worry now is that, since the words are all complete words, and there's a finite list of 1,118 words to play with, the player's eventually going to end up playing the same words over and over, and it'll get easier and easier as a result.
Perhaps I should even stop trying to form words to start with..?
Maybe random letters are indeed better?



The basic gist is something like...
Word given = "NEURAL"
Shuffle the letters to form the word "LEARN", and give the cow the leftover U to smash.

Hmmm.
Again, more experimenting is necessary to finalise exactly what this game is supposed to be!
*checks remaining time*
Eeek!

A.I. Corner

Lyrics : I fed all the game's words from A to C into ChatGPT and asked it to make a rap!
Sound Imported : Generous Nourishment
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Alternative version
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Sung by Suno


"Cartoon Derek passes a letter "U" to a cow, so it can hit the "U" with a pickaxe." by Replicate/Flux

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