WordLand News
Point Scoring Changes
In continuing effort to simplify the scoring of the game the following changes have been made.
- All tiles are worth 2 territory points
- Wraping and connecting double territory points
- Bonus chain affects bonus points (again) as well as territory points
- Bonus points scale down relative to ghost mode value
- No more war mode
More tweaks may be necessary, but such is life!
Update to Fortresses
Fortresses now come with inherent territory points, making them more desirable. Collect ’em all!
New Game Mode: Fortresses!
Added a new game mode, Fortresses. When you choose this option, a percentage of the bonus cells in the game become fortified. This means whoever claims that cell first, cannot lose ownership of it. If an opponent plays off of that tile, you will gain the territory points. Fortresses are also impervious to Bombs. Bombs blowing up in the vicinity will not affect Fortress cells. Now go play with some Fortresses!
Game Features for All!
All level 1 game features are available by default to all users now. To use the higher levels of each feature, you need to unlock them. Enjoy!
Panzoomable Board and Change to Scoring
You’ll surely notice that on desktop and mobile the board is zoomable and panable independently of the rest of the game elements. On mobile you pinch and drag, and on desktop there is the zoom slider and you can click-drag to pan.
The change to scoring is the bonus chain now affects territory points and not bonus points. The multiplier goes up faster (0.25 for each chain level) and it the way you increase your chain has changed to the following scale.
- Rack size: 5 => play 4 or more tiles
- Rack size: 6 => play 4 or more tiles
- Rack size: 7 => play 5 or more tiles
- Rack size: 8 => play 5 or more tiles
- Rack size: 9 => play 6 or more tiles
- Rack size: 10 => play 6 or more tiles
This change is to hopefully make the game more strategic with territory points and tile placement.
WordLand Now Accepts Bitcoin!
Thanks to stripe. Now all you people who don’t purchase any coins can imagine purchasing them with bitcoin!
Ghost Mode and Game View Changes
Introducing Ghost Mode. This is a new mode which you can choose for any War Mode game which makes all of the tiles in the game blank. The idea is to test your long word-making abilities as well as placement strategy. We shall see how this mode plays out.
Changed is the layout of some of the features for the in-game view. Toggle buttons and indicators are now at the top along side the title, round and game mode icons. The tile rack is now fixed to the bottom and the buttons have been spruced up with some color.
Your feedback on these new features and changes, as always, is greatly appreciated.
WordLand out.
Mobile Site and Email Notifications
The site now has a more mobile-friendly version. It is simplified and faster. There are only 3 pages. Home/login, games list and game show. This should (and does) make the site run a lot quicker and use less bandwidth. Works well on Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
Email notifications have finally arrived. For now they are only in place for new game requests, when it is your turn in a game and finished games. More to come in the near future. You can turn these notifications off or on in your settings under edit account.
The main navigation bar in the desktop version of the site got an overhaul as well. Each list is loaded on-demand so all the pages should load faster and you only get the relevant information when requested.
Carry on playing WordLand!
Game Selection Enhancements
Changed are the options when you are selecting a game to play. You can now make any game War Mode, Timed Mode, Elite Mode and Scattered (see rules for details). This essentially multiplied the number of game combinations to… well, too many to count. Subsequently about 7 preset games have been removed from the list. These ones were the duplicates of the same boards but with different game modes locked into the preset.
Your already finished games of these types have been migrated over to the corresponding same-board game and all statistics remain intact. Because of this, the finished game filter got the addition of a mode filter for viewing your stats on the same board, but with different options.
For those of you who purchased any of the preset games (boards) that were removed, your tokens have been refunded.
Enjoy!
Statistics, Achievements, Push State and Performance
Hello all. Back again with many more updates to tell you all about.
First off is the statistics section. Navigate to the Finished Games section in your profile view and you will see all of your statistics versus all opponents on all boards. You can then filter by opponent and/or board to see specific statistics for that combination. Neat! Use the data to your advantage.
Next up is the Achievements section. It has gone through a massive overhaul and is (hopefully) more navigable, succinct and fun. Achievements are grouped into categories (being prestigious appellations) and are laid out much more efficiently. There are also total token counts with each group letting you know how many tokens you have earned from each type of achievement. A grand total of all earned tokens is displayed at the top of the page as well. New achievements have been added and old ones have been tweaked. Brag to your friends about your levels!
Push state. This is fancy internet talk for remembering where you are whilst navigating around your profile. Click on any links and your browser will remember where you went (you can use the back button etc.) and you can also bookmark exactly where you are should you choose to do so.
Lastly are some performance improvements I am working on. Namely making the games load faster and everything run smoother. I won’t get into the boring details of what was done, but I hope you see an improvement. Oh yeah, I also switched hosts for my server which included double the RAM at a lower price. Excellent.
Thank you all for continuing to play and joining me along for this ride. WordLand ho!
WordLand Alpha V3.0
Well the game is finally coming together.
The achievements that you unlock while playing the game now reward you with tokens. You can then spend these tokens to unlock boards of your choice. Along with this, choosing boards got a much needed filter (with improvements to come) to make finding and picking them easier. Different boards take different amounts of tokens to unlock and different achievements give you different amounts of tokens as a reward.
Along with this system, you can now support the development of this game by purchasing tokens. There are 6 different packages to buy, each one increasing in price and value. The payment system is through stripe and is completely safe as no credit card information that you submit ever hits my server. It all goes directly to them and they just let me know if the transaction succeeded.
Almost every view has now been incorporated into your ‘profile’ view for easy access and a much needed indicator has been added to let you know when things are loading. Also every click you make in this view is now saved to the browsers history and you can navigate back and forth as well as bookmark the exact page you are on. This should come in handy.
There are still about 1000 things that need to be done, things that need to be changed and designs that need to be tweaked and redone, but that will never end.
Thanks for playing so far and as always, let me know of any issues that arise.
Two New Dictionaries and Streamlined Tile Sets
Two new dictionaries were added to the game today. ENABLE2K (Enhanced North American Benchmark LExicon) and YAWL (Yet Another Word List). Feel free to change it up against your opponent. Perhaps she will not be able to use her favorite word against you.
The Tile Sets have all been streamlined and equalized. They are now all using the same values and there are only 7 different ones. They are all named after their size, and are shown next to the Bingo Value when selecting a game. There may be cases where a game now has too many or too little of tiles so please email your feedback and let me know your experiences. wordland.ca@gmail.com.
Welcome The Release of WordLand Alpha 2.0!
WordLand Alpha 2.0 has arrived! The first thing you will notice is a massive overhaul of the look and feel of the game. It is slowly looking more and more like an actual game, and is still going to be improved and changed in many areas as the game keeps progressing. As always, your feedback is welcome and greatly appreciated. There is a new contact email which is wordland.ca@gmail.com. Please send any game-related emails to that address and I will respond if necessary.
The second thing you will notice is the new profile page. Each person has one and this is where all related information about your user will be. Everything is rendered into a ‘one page’ view for a convenient way to access the information. You can view the profile pages of your friends as well. At the top of each profile page you will see the most basic statistics. If you are viewing a friend’s profile, you will also see versus statistics at the top. When viewing someone else’s page you are limited to viewing just their activity feed. That is the next new feature. This is an up-to-the-minute history of what players are doing on WordLand. This feature is very new and will be refined as time goes on.
Next up is the beginning of what I have been calling it “making a game out of this glorified tech demo.” This is where achievements come into play. As you play games you will naturally unlock achievements, which all have an associated new board to play on. If you are a new player, you start with one board, and will progressively unlock new ones. Existing players will have their achievements brought up to date with the lovely help of scripts. There are a lot of achievements you will unlock just by playing lots of games. There are also a lot where you might have to figure out how to unlock them by doing different things while playing (and while navigating around the world of WordLand). There are currently 38 achievements (yes, that means 38 different boards to play) with more always coming. You can also view all of the unlockable achievements along with a hint of how to unlock them. Future plans will allow for each achievement to be purchase unlocked.
The last new section of the profile page is the statistics area. This contains just a few basic statistics for each user and will be expanded upon in the future. In the pipeline there is a massive stats section planned, but that will not be for a while so this is what you get for now.
The new game page got a much needed upgrade as well. You can now easily select any one of your unlocked games to play in two different ways, and see a preview of the board along with all necessary information about game modes, bonus points and rack size. Choosing your opponent and other options has also never been easier.
The last thing to get an overhaul is, of course, the in-game view. Things are laid out in almost the same areas as they were previously, but have a lot more character and visibility to them. The only major difference is the points breakdown bar. Each player and move made has a breakdown of the types of points gained, with a visual representation of the percentage of each type.
Now that you have read all about the new features, go ahead and play the game!
As always, any bugs you come across please let me know about them and I will get to fixing them as soon as possible. For the quickest response email me at wordland.ca@gmail.com.
Thanks to everyone for playing and testing the game for me and I hope you enjoy doing so. Now more than ever.