(Download link: here)
Verbal Kombat is a text-based game I wrote for the text-based game competition on the Moosader boards – I made it in only a few days, so it’s not quite AAA, but I’m pleased with the result.
The game is a text-based fighting game. Much like in Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat or Tekken, your character faces an enemy character in a fight. Only here, it’s a battle of wits – every “strike” you make is simply a word, and the magical forces around you turn those into a power that takes away the focus of the opponent. Once the opponent is worn out – you win.
Features:
– Selection from 8 characters.
– 8 Unlockable achievements.
– 3 Difficulty levels, plus practice mode.
Instructions:
The game uses the leftmost keys of a standard QWERTY keyboard – ‘q’, ‘w’, ‘a’, ‘s’, ‘z’, ‘x’. Type four of those to create a word, and it will damage your opponent’s focus.
The key to the game is the spectrum. As you utter words, the magical spectrum around you gets cluttered, making your next words less effective. Every time you use a letter, its part of the spectrum increases, and next uses of it will cause less damage. The spectrum constantly refreshes, allowing you to use again letters that were previously cluttered.
The opponent also has a spectrum – it blocks them in the same way, but it’s also important to you – to make your word reach the enemy, you need its letters to connect with their spectrum. Thus, you need to use letters that are low in your own spectrum, but high in the opponent’s spectrum.
The spectrum is displayed under your character’s name – the more a letter’s marker is to the right, the more cluttered it is.
In addition, every character has special properties and one special ability. The special ability has its own letter sequence you must use to activate it.
The game is written in Java, and released under the simplified BSD license.
Download it here.
Shai Shapira 