Thanks! Proper nouns (generally capitalised words) are disallowed so June won't. Not sure how best to communicate this in the game though.
The original had a wall-of-text pop-up of the rules when you first started that I want to avoid and I'd rather players picked up the rules organically. Maybe showing a "proper nouns and capitalised words not allowed" message when you spelled one would be a nice approach but a list of such words would be massive and inaccurate.
I think people generally figure out this rule as they play more but I admit it's not ideal!
It is interesting because the same happened to me while trying the game.
If something happens to almost everybody, why don't you change your game?
When I design a complex system like a game or computer programs, once the system starts working on their own, it talks to me. I learn a lot from the interaction with it.
This is specially important when you have millions of users. They communicate to you what the next step is much better than the best design you could draft isolated on your own.
Yep, I'm up for making change based on player behaviour and ideally the game would have zero instructions. Proper nouns come up often in feedback too.
Adding proper nouns has a few issues though:
- Where would you get an accurate dictionary of proper nouns? This would need to include e.g. people names, places, brand names. If it wasn't constantly kept up to date it could lead to more frustrations than just disallowing them.
- There's so many proper nouns it would bloat the game download. The English dictionary used right now takes about 3MB, which is the limiting factoring getting the game download lower than 1MB zipped. I'm failing to find an estimate but if you include proper nouns, the dictionary would be an order or magnitude bigger. Maybe less of an issue for mobile app store downloads but I want the game to load fast when shared online. A web service to check the words won't work for offline play either.
It's feeling like a "dictionary words only" message somewhere is the only practical solution. I could adapt the (single!) tutorial message at the start of the game to be "swipe in any direction to spell dictionary words" but "dictionary words" would probably be overlooked. There's no menu screen at the start because I know people are impatient. :)
Not everyone has a fast connection though and you'll try the patience of new players by making them wait just a few seconds. I also like optimising so if I can make the transfer size x10 smaller I will. :)
The original had a wall-of-text pop-up of the rules when you first started that I want to avoid and I'd rather players picked up the rules organically. Maybe showing a "proper nouns and capitalised words not allowed" message when you spelled one would be a nice approach but a list of such words would be massive and inaccurate.
I think people generally figure out this rule as they play more but I admit it's not ideal!