New Game

You heard it here folks. I’m introducing a spinoff site for daily games. Think of it a bit like Wordle but directly tied to the games on my main site. The first daily game I am creating will be a new concept called Noun Sense.

It’s a game about adjective and noun association. The basic gameplay loop is simple: you are given 10 adjectives each day, and you have to guess the most frequently used noun that follows each adjective. The more frequent the usage in common English, the higher the score. A maximum of 100 points are awarded with total max score of 1000 each day. I crunched some massive text files combining sources from movies, magazines, news articles, Wikipedia and even transcripts from Ted Talks. The data set should be pretty fair for the average native English speaker.

Prior to attending PGConnects London, I released a new game called “Paka Paka” (Swahili for “Cat Cat”).

It’s a game about recognizing animal sounds. It fits my platform perfectly. It is fun for both kids and adults, it’s easily localized to most/all languages, it’s easy to understand and it’s nice to look at. With the bonus impression stage, it’s also a good ice breaker. Who doesn’t want to see their friend attempt to make a Rhinoceros noise!?

This “new” game has a special place in my heart. It’s a re-imagining of a game I played all the time in high school back in the early 2000s. Late nights spent with friends pre-cable internet. Using our AOL connections and firing up Acrophobia. Making inside jokes and coming up with clever acronyms to make each other laugh (and hopefully score points too!). I actually wrote a version of this back in 2017 as part of my prototypes that came before Gametje. This one is luckily far more polished visually and with proper gameplay mechanics. Meet AcroByte:

Getting Ideas

My kids have been bugging me about creating another game that they can play. I already have RPS SHOOT which is a twist on the classic Rock, Paper, Scissors game that they enjoy, but that game is nearly a year old now. Kids get bored easily and always want a shiny new thing to play with after all. My daughter is not able to read that well yet so I knew I needed to do something without many words. I thought about the games my kids like to play. Some of their current favorites are UNO, Go Fish, Memory and Yahtzee. They also love to play hide and seek (especially when I pretend to be bad at looking). Last year, I had been playing around with some protoypes using HTML Canvas to try to make a more traditional game on the platform. I looked at PixiJS which seemed promising but was a bit overkill for what I wanted to do. Perhaps I’ll revisit that in the future for other games.