v0.13: Ergonomics & Clarity

Thank you to the nearly 10,000 people who played the Func Key Demo during Steam Next Fest! The support and feedback from you all has been unbelievable. I'm so grateful to everyone who gave the game a shot, I hope you enjoyed it :) And there's so much more still to come!

This patch is the culmination of 150 Google Form responses, 90 bug reports, and tons of discussions in the Discord and Steam Forum. I'd love to take more credit, but most of the ideas here come right from player suggestions. Thank you for making my job easier :)

This patch is all about ergonomics and clarity. A few highlights:

• Editing the word you're spelling just got a lot easier. You can drag letters to reorder, left click to remove, right click to truncate, and shift+backspace to clear.

• Applying keycaps and using items has been streamlined. For simple things like keycaps, just click the keycap and then the letter you want to select, no need to confirm. It also doesn't interrupt the word you're spelling, so you don't have to erase and start again.

• Scoring was rewritten to support larger scores! I never though this would happen so soon, but the max score has been increased from 2 billion to now 1.8e308 (that 1.8 and then 307 zeros)!

With these changes out of the way, I'll be shifting my focus to some larger mechanics changes and more work on the full release. Follow on Steam if you'd like to follow along!

Happy typing!

• OneBitBean

Patch notes

Spelling ergonomics

• Letters in the draft area can be drag and dropped to reorder

• Typing with a keyboard prefers the higher value or enhanced letters

• The submit button shows whether or not a word is valid as you type

• New shortcut: Shift+letter to cycle the last instance of that letter

• New shortcut: Shift+backspace to clear the draft

• New shortcut: Left click draft letter to remove it

• New shortcut: Right click draft letter to remove it and all following letters

Item ergonomics

• Show item quest progress better in tooltip (e.g. which lengths missing for Astronaut)

• Items that don't target letters (e.g. battery) are immediately used when bought

• Items that you can't use will not show up in the shop (e.g. if you maxed board size)

• Makes it so clicking the actual item in the shop purchases it

• Reduces the number of clicks required for using an item from storage from 4 to 2 clicks

  • Added an option in settings to always require confirmation for accessibility

  • Retains the drafted word when using items so you don't need to erase and start over

• Show what letters items in the shop affect on hover (similar to items you own)

General

• Add save corruption prevention, backups and recovery mechanism

• Scoring now uses 64-bit floating point values, allowing scores up to 1.8e308

• Improve number formatting, with commas up to 1mil and scientific notation above

• Enter key can be used to dismiss the round over summary and go to the shop

Balance and clarity

• Word length vs post length

  • Tries to make "post length" and "word length" match their underlying effects and have it work more intuitively in the player's favor for things like Astronaut.

  • Balance: Make Astronaut based on post length (rather than word length)

  • Reword challenge: "only one post length can be played"

  • Reword challenge: "posts must be 3 letters or less"

  • Reword challenge: "no repeat post lengths"

• Looong: changed to "Accepts words with up to 3 extra repeat vowels"

  • Fixes confusion that Looong would let a single letter key be repeated

  • Mechanically changes so that you can repeat different vowels (e.g. reeaad)

• Replaces "per turn" with "per post" since "turn" isn't referred to elsewhere

• Clarify that Prolific increases per letter scored (i.e. works with retrigger)

• Add single letter words "A" and "I" to the dictionary

Bug fixes

• Fixes issue when discarding many keys at once (this caused a lot of odd issues like saying a word was already played, letter not found, or z-fighting)

• Fixes issue where unequipping supercharge left you with more than max battery

• Fixes issue where UI shows the wrong batter amount while scoring if you own supercharge

• Fixes issue where tile and item tooltips did not update while in storage or in letter bag

• Fixes issue where item preview (hover to show letters) didn't update in storage

• Fixes issue where debuff stays after key no longer meets the criteria

• Fixes issue where debuffs weren't applied after resizing keyboard

• Fixes issue where po-ta-to dashes in draft area stay after key is gone

• Fixes issue where exiting a game while scoring is ongoing crashes/freezes

• Fixes issue in tutorial where game crashed if you didn't have brown key and storage was full

• Fixes issue where error messages showed over menus or dialogs

• Fixes issue where "Home" item was targeting the wrong keys

• Fixes the minimum width of the "Sponsor" area when you don't have any