Word Whirlwind

A submission for the GMTK Game Jam 2024.

This is my second ever game jam and I did it solo. I'm pleased with the result, and I hope you enjoy playing! Inspired by some of the games I love: the New York Times Spelling Bee, the board game Letter Jam, Slay the Spire, and the entire turn based RPG genre.

Notes about the theme

The theme for the jam is "Built to Scale". As you progress in levels, the damage, health, hp, number of letters, and amount of time you get all scale to be larger and larger.

I was planning on adding a player character sprite and enemy sprites, and the enemies would also start off small and get bigger, giving a more literal interpretation of "Built to Scale". But I wanted to focus more on making the game fun with the time that I had.

In my original ambitious vision for the game, you would also level up letters in some way, maybe you have a deck of letters, or you just level up specific letters like "T". When you level up the letters, they would also get bigger on screen. The letters would be runestones that you fling at your enemy with wind magic, which is also partially where the title came from.

Credits

Word list from YAWL (Yet Another Word List): https://github.com/elasticdog/yawl/tree/master

Background art by "bevouliin.com" on opengameart.org: https://opengameart.org/content/bevouliin-free-mountain-game-background