This Indie Game Puts Tower Defense Twist On Scrabble
Every word you spell becomes a tower with its own unique abilities in Towers of Babble.
Towers of Babble by Everybody House Games mixes a classic word game with tower defense. Each noun becomes a building you can place on the map, while you gather resources and build towers to hold off waves of enemies. Each building also has different stats and abilities depending on the word you use.
AXE, for example, can harvest wood, while FORT is a strong tower with extra health and armor. DOCTOR is weaker, but its aura can heal nearby buildings. You can also use adjectives and verbs as modifiers to boost your buildings or give them new abilities.
According to the developer, the game has a little over 200,000 units, with their powers assigned using a combination of a semantic relationship library and manual design for around 10,000 of them. Towers of Babble also has a massive co-op feature inspired by Team 0%: to complete the game, the whole player base has to work together to unlock every single word. The game features over 120,000 levels organized in eight difficulty tiers, so good luck making it through them all.
Here's a bit from the developer explaining how exactly the gameplay was designed:
"There's basically a huge list of tower defense game-style stats: Pierce, Poison, Splash, Slow, Knockback, etc. I won't list them all, it's a lot. And then they get assigned some stats based on their semantic relationships. And then for all the 10,000 most common words, I went through by hand and made sure they had stats that made sense.
So SNAKE originally had Slow, which kind of makes sense, I guess, but I gave it Poison instead. DOCTOR and NURSE get a Heal Aura, PANDA harvests Wood, and so on. I'd say for the hand-designed ones, checking each word and giving it the proper specials was probably about 30 seconds to a minute per word. The process was probably pretty similar to what they did on Scribblenauts.
We used a combination of a couple of libraries and ended up embedding both the word and the definition to try to get at meaning more effectively. I used a combination of WordNet, Word2Vec, and Wiktionary definitions to do a first pass and then went in by hand for some of them. For the broader 200,000 set, it's still pretty good, but there will definitely be some clunkers I expect people to find after the game comes out! Tower strength also scales based on word complexity + length + what the word would score in Scrabble."
Towers of Babble
Towers of Babble
Towers of Babble
Apparently, the most poisonous tower you can make is COXSACKIEVIRUS, a virus that causes hand, foot, and mouth disease. And, of course, there are plenty of Easter eggs to discover:
Towers of Babble
To keep things manageable, the game is limited to playable Scrabble words, with a maximum length of 15 letters.
The developer is also planning to release the demo within the next one to two weeks, so keep an eye out and wishlist the game on Steam if you're interested. Subscribe to our Newsletter, join our 80 Level Talent platform, Discord, and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
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