Don't dodge the score creep
My incredibly lofty goal for Wordrush is to get to a place where all scores are comparable across all languages and modes (with the exclusion of Pythia and Zen because I'm not gonna touch those). And when I say "lofty" I mean "not gonna happen soon", and when I say "soon" I mean "ever".
There are several problems with my goal but, basically, they boil down to three:
1. I don't know enough maths to properly calculate the probabilities, so I have to rely on bruteforce data collection and it turns out that 1000 grids are not enough to get a reasonable assessment because the next 1000 grids have wildly different results
2. I don't know enough linguistics to estimate the difficulty of a language based on mysterious structures that only members of the Elucidated Brethren Of The Ebon Lexicon are aware of
3. Keef. Keef is the best Wordrush player and he started playing very soon (thank you mate). Unfortunately Keef is *so much better* than the rest of us. It's kind of like being Pelops back in 700bc, and saying "Hey guys, what do you think about an event where we all run and who wins gets an olive wreath and more oil that they know what to do with," and you organize the Olympics and the very first person to show up is Usain Bolt.
So, well, I spent the last couple of weeks trying to see if there was anything that gave Usa^H^H^H Keef an unfair advantage, and the result of my investigations is that indeed there is, and it's called being incredibly good at this game.
On the other hand, I'd very much like other players to feel like they have at least a fighting chance (narrator: they don't) so here we go with a couple changes that should, somehow, someway, make our defeat a little less embarassing.
First of all: the "next up" will no longer include plaintext long words - if you complete a 10-letter word, the replacement is not going to be another one, but rather a composite of two 10-letter words. That shouldn't change anything in most games, but it prevents "easy" streaks of multiple long words.
Second: I have removed the "only unique" limitation for shape bonuses; what this means is that, e.g., if you find a word that looks like a ladder, your bonus is going to account for every single time you change direction, rather than only twice.
Third: I have introduced a bonus for corner and edge letters; the reasoning is that the central ones have 8 ways of connections, while edges have 5 and corners have only 3. It's a BIG bonus, because it multiplies the whole shape bonus, but in most cases it's still less than adding a letter.
Fourth: the timed modes had a small score bump (only Rush had it before, now it's all of them).
Finally: I have decided to show the score you could make _as you select_. I'm not 100% sold on the usefulness (or even if it's a good idea or not) but it looks kinda nifty so there you go.
Hope you'll enjoy it. Please like and subscribe? Something something.
Files
Wordrush
[Just/Nothing] like a classic wordsearch
Status | In development |
Author | pgcd |
Genre | Puzzle |
Tags | Casual, Minimalist, No AI, Relaxing, Short, Singleplayer, Touch-Friendly, wordsearch |
Languages | German, English, Spanish; Castilian, Spanish; Latin America, Italian |
More posts
- Scoreboard and rotating grids24 days ago
- Are you a showoff?32 days ago
- Dabbling in things men are not meant to wot of55 days ago
- Not all languages are created equal77 days ago
- Quick fix to initial layout83 days ago
- Goodbye, ABBA83 days ago
- Improved help & single-letter removal protection84 days ago
- Better sharing86 days ago
- New language, faster loading88 days ago
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