Lexcavator

May 9, 2012 4:15 PM

Lexcavator
Lexcavator is an arcade/word game for Mac, PC, and Linux. The goal: guide your guy (@) deeper into an infinite of letters by clearing words from the board! Multiple game modes, detailed record-keeping, online global leaderboards—there's something here for everybody! Pay what you want (even $0, if you are so inclined).

Here's the trailer. You can also download the soundtrack from Bandcamp.

I've been working on the game for the past year or so. The goal was to make a fast-paced word game that rewards wits and tactics, but doesn't rely on having memorized every three-letter Scrabble word. Internally, the game uses n-gram analysis and Markov chains to ensure that the board is always filled with meaty, satisfying words. One reviewer called it "Words With Friends as an action game," and I am not going to argue with that characterization.

The game was programmed entirely in Python (using the excellent processing.py framework).

Role: programmer, game designer, artist, musician

posted by aparrish (5 comments total)

This project was posted to MetaFilter by davidjmcgee on May 10, 2012: Lexcavator

Love it. Bought it.
posted by bongo_x at 6:23 PM on May 9, 2012 [1 favorite]

Beautiful design and excellent Mega Man-esque music. Bought!

(BTW, your FastSpring checkout thing seems to not let you change the amount if you entered the wrong one by mistake. Not sure if there's anything you can do about it, but I thought I'd let you know.)
posted by ignignokt at 10:01 AM on May 10, 2012

Oh. This rules. Yes yes yes.
posted by davidjmcgee at 12:11 PM on May 10, 2012

This game is excellent.
posted by kcalder at 9:37 AM on May 11, 2012

This is really neat, I love word games. Well done on 3 operating systems and it's very cool that you've used processing.py :)
posted by Enki at 3:58 PM on May 31, 2012