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t9 Scramble
t9 Scramble is a new twist on the traditional word puzzle game. The
player is a presented with a poorly entered t9 txt msg and her job is
to descramble or decipher the message word by word. The player’s guess
has to match the scrambled word’s t9 digits. For example, the user
might be presented with “ape wot these?” and she must determine word
by word that the intended txt msg was “are you there?” The presented
txts are generally more interesting than this example since they have
been lifted from the popular website textsfromlastnight.com.
This game was written and produced by Alec Jacobson for Professor Perlin’s fall 2009 games class. This is the second set of mini games that the class has worked on.
AVERAGE RATING
(4 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)
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I really like the mechanics of getting the answer, how it subtracts the word from the yet-to-be-translated sentence. It might be nice though if it kept everything but greyed out the already guessed portion and underlined the next word to be figured out. Watching someone else play it wasn’t clear what the game actually was, but that’s probably true for many games.
The color scheme is pretty offensive, but almost fits with the cartoon-y art. It would be nice to randomize the items, since I restarted and got the same first few which I knew from before. It’s an original concept, yet a pretty intuitive interface for it. Good job!
October 27, 2009 @ 12:51 am
Thanks Kai,
In the revised and reimplemented version of t9 scramble it will be a in browser game that can grab new txts from the website textsfromlastnight so that each instance is a different game.
I admit that I am attracted to these color schemes that most other people find offensive but in this case I think you are probably especially right.
I also like your idea about working on descrambling the text without splitting it up the way I do. Perhaps I will also modify the game to do what you say in that regard.
October 27, 2009 @ 6:30 pm
This game concept is very original, I had a lot of fun playing with it.
One thing I didn’t like was that it skipped the words that were correct. I’d often try to type in the whole phrase and rack up a lot of red before I realized the problem.
October 27, 2009 @ 10:55 pm
Nice game and can get quite addicting to play. The sound effects go well with the theme as well.
One suggestion is to give a player lets say 3 chances before the game is over. What happens here is that if I am not able to figure out one word in the given guesses, the game is done. Either that or to have 2 or 3 hints in the entire game that the player can use when stuck. This way one abbreviation or a text lingo that a player does not know does not ruin a game.
For later levels you can blanks inside scrambled words. So not only do you find our the correct letter but also fill in one or two letters in the word by guessing them.
Good game overall. Its good you have a picture of a keypad because these days on smart phones the keypads have changed and you have to use google to find this keypad!
October 28, 2009 @ 1:32 am
Mike,
I struggled with this issue a lot. On the one hand you are very right. There’s no way for the user to know that she doesn’t need to type out the words that are already correct. Eventually this is learned, but it can be jarring and damaging at first. On the other hand it was annoying to have to type out long words or phrases, also the correct words are hints to the overall meaning so knowing that there are some correct words is a good thing.
I think a decent compromise for the next version is to color all of the already correct words differently than the rest. That way the user knows something is up right from the get go.
Thanks for the comment.
October 28, 2009 @ 2:55 am
Rachit,
I like your ideas about hit limits and hints. I want to incorporate a better punishment/reward system in the next version. What I’m imagining is more along the lines of a cumulative damage bar that carries damages from word to word and when you beat the level maybe you earn hints which you can use to uncover hard scrambled words.
I’m wary of the blanks but not so wary that I won’t try it. My thought is that the hard levels are hard enough, but perhaps this will be a good catch for users that have become very good and need a new challenge.
Thanks for the comments
October 28, 2009 @ 2:58 am
Everytime I started to feel frustrated and about to hit up, I would make a breakfast and jeep playing. It was really addiction and satisfy.
In the early levels it would be really helpful to know how many of the letters are wrong. You could gray these out or underline them or something. Also just having fewer mangled words would be great to start.
The colors are refreshing and the sounds are great. The hanging up sound didn’t make a lot of sense to me though.
October 28, 2009 @ 12:24 pm
Creative game concept. Creative art direction. Just the right difficulty level. Learning how to play was easy. Addictive. I like it a lot.
For the discouraged players, maybe add a hint option. (I see this was mentioned before). I had no trouble figuring out what to type and what not to type.
Did you get the actual scrambled words from the t9 dictionary? I guess this would make the game too easy, cuz then you could just memorize the variations. I hope it becomes viral when you put it up on the web.
@Murphy: hahaha
October 28, 2009 @ 2:39 pm
This is a great game concept. What I think is great about the game is that its replayibility is very high. Since the game mechanic itself is very simple and interesting, as long as you get new texts to decipher, you can keep playing.
Once you have an online version, if you track users’ gameplay – how long it took for the text to be deciphered, how many people got a certain text wrong – you could use these statistics to scale the difficulty of the game, by estimating the difficulty level of text by how users fared against it.
October 28, 2009 @ 4:49 pm
Very nice game. It was addictive. I got stuck with a line with a word “goto” whose answer I could not figure out, so I lost, but It would have been nice to get the answer back. Other than that, everything was good.
October 28, 2009 @ 7:40 pm
Murphy,
I like the idea for the training level. Greying out incorrect words would be a nice way to show the user what to do.
I will have to come up with a way of sorting the original texts to determine in at least a rough way which are “easy” or “hard”.
I agree about the hanging up sound…
Thanks
October 29, 2009 @ 5:33 pm
Long,
I have been thinking a lot about the “Hint” option. I don’t want to make it “free” otherwise the addictive element (like in a crossword puzzle where you don’t get hints just the whole solution tomorrow (unless you’re willing/crazy to pay $0.99 per minute)). I’m also worried about having too complicated of a point system. The intent is still to have this game be overall passive.
I generate a t9 dictionary at load time (it’s fast enough so I don’t bother saving it). I hesitate to agree that anyone will memorize all combinations of 8 digits each would could be 3 to 4 letters. We will have to see if the masters of t9 scramble are banking on this skill.
Thank you for your hopes that it becomes viral. I do, too.
October 29, 2009 @ 8:46 pm
Rutvij,
I plan to either have a hint system (see above comment), or a ‘give up’ system that will handle the problem you’ve address. Thank you for your valuable comment.
October 29, 2009 @ 8:47 pm
Sidharth,
I agree that statistics generated from this game could be useful. I should talk to the t9 people…
Thanks
October 29, 2009 @ 8:49 pm
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