Combobulate

The game can take a few moments to start up

Run the Combobulation machine for the Dark Lord Belzedor as part of your new job which will keep you stuck in a loop of fulfilling the Dark Lord's wishes for all eternity. Think on your feet to come up with words which are semantically similar to the words requested. It is highly recommended to do the tutorial before playing (mainly because I spent ages making it!)

Controls

• Move with WASD or the arrow keys
• Click to interact with objects that are close to your player
• These can be configured in the options menu

How does the game know if two words are similar?

The game uses word vectors to check for semantic similarities between words. It assigns a 300-dimensional vector to every noun in the English language, which represents the meaning of the word. Then the angle between two of these vectors corresponds to how similar the words are. The score you receive in-game for a word is derived from this.

This is a very robust and general check for similarity, and it doesn't just check if two words are synonymous - 'light' and 'dark' are very close, as are 'cloak' and 'dagger'. Words being related generally means that they are used in similar contexts. 

From the main menu, you can select "Test word vectors" to get a menu where you can try out similarities between words. (It originally had a thing to show you the closest and furthest words too, but that locked up the game for a few seconds, so was dropped)

Credits

Made in 72 hours for MiniJam 113, with the theme of "Final Boss" and restriction of "Stuck in a loop"

All code, art and sound effects produced by me during the jam, with the exception of:

• Leaderboard functionality provided by SilentWolf
• Text scrolling sound from EVRetro via https://freesound.org
• Music from https://www.zapsplat.com
• Palette from https://lospec.com/palette-list/crimson
• Player sprite edited from 0x72's dungeon tileset
• The word vectors used in this game are from https://fasttext.cc/docs/en/english-vectors.html.