Sternly Worded Adventures
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
To whom it may concern;
Sternly Worded Adventures is a roguelite word puzzle RPG inspired by Bookworm Adventures where you travel through a forested peninsula with Yorkshire-sounding place names fighting monsters with the power of words to uncover whatever dark secrets may be lurking beyond.
Play over 8 different classes, fight over 15 different enemies, unlock over 180 items, and spell words with over 25 different letters!
What's available in the demo?
In the demo you play as the adventurer class, which is the only class unlocked from the start regardless of version, and you can unlock but not use most of the other classes. You can play any adventure node up to and including level 3. Visiting a level 4 node triggers an event that ends the demo. You have access to every item the adventurer could normally access except for one, which is restricted because it can trigger the afore mentioned event early, and you can access both of the minigames, wordle and minesweeper, and challenge mode, without limit.
You can directly continue your save file from the demo in the full version.
Wishlist Sternly Worded Adventures on Steam!
Steam keys will be redeemable to itch owners, new and old, but wishlisting still helps.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $5 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Download demo
Development log
- V38: The return to sender hotfix1 day ago
- V37: Warmfix3 days ago
- V36: The "Oops! All Achievements" hotfix7 days ago
- V35: Hotfix14 days ago
- V34: Wild Pregame23 days ago
- Poll: Future update focusDec 20, 2023
- V33: HotfixDec 03, 2023
- V32: The Definitive updateNov 18, 2023
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
I got no where else to place this bug so ig here will due (full version and latest patch (37.1)
Error
rpgenemy.lua:13: attempt to concatenate field 'state' (a nil value)
Traceback
[love "callbacks.lua"]:228: in function 'handler'
rpgenemy.lua:13: in function 'getStateData'
rpgenemy.lua:96: in function 'update'
rpgview.lua:1160: in function 'update'
main.lua:102: in function 'update'
[love "callbacks.lua"]:162: in function <[love "callbacks.lua"]:144>
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
I'm trying to work out how this could have happened unless you managed to download v37 in between me checking the analytics and seeing no downloads, and finishing uploading and publishing the amended version (that I thought I'd only privately referred to as 37.1).
Can you confirm that the issue persists on the currently available version? And if so could you describe the game state when it occurred?
The game state is right as the final person of a shrine battle dies right as the money on screen spawns and the sound is made suddenly the game just crashes, same crash every time. I assume it could relate to sending "send" prior in the fights(which also crashes the game but I assume intentional (if not, oh no)) (also I can look at the file description and it says 37.1)
Not intentional, I'll investigate both.
I've found the source of both bugs and fixed them. I'll get a hotfix out shortly.
Nice!
Yo how do I cross the ocean
Other than using the capital city to regenerate the world you don't really. Have you found one of the rare seeds where there's a disconnected land mass?
Not sure where the best place is to post crashes etc. Got this one trying to fight a highwayman. Fun game. The bronze bonsai tree tiles are bit harder for my brain to process but might just be me.
Error
ui/objects/tile.lua:198: attempt to perform arithmetic on a nil value
Traceback
[love "callbacks.lua"]:228: in function 'handler'
ui/objects/tile.lua:198: in function 'getRelativeRegularMaterial'
tileboard.lua:273: in function 'getTileLegendMaterialReplacement'
tileboard.lua:286: in function 'generateTileForRefresh'
tileboard.lua:357: in function 'fill'
tileboard.lua:504: in function 'onPlayerTurn'
rpgview.lua:854: in function <rpgview.lua:833>
rpgview.lua:1019: in function 'update'
main.lua:70: in function 'update'
[love "callbacks.lua"]:162: in function <[love "callbacks.lua"]:144>
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
Keeps crashing every few fights with the same log now :(
This appears to be a conflict between the voiceless rough stone charm and the bronze bonsai. If you're able, unequip one of them until I can get a fix out.
Edit: I have a fix, I'll see if I can easily untangle it from the unfinished new update for a hotfix, or finish the update in the next day or two.
Okay, no rush I started a new game anyway. You should post the game to some Scrabble communities once you're happy with it. A lot of them would be interested.
Lots of fun, I sunk a couple of hours right after discovering the game, at the cost of some sleep... Better to do it in spurts to have a fresh mind when going at it.
Excellent fun, thank you.
[slight spolier below]
But I'm a bit confused. I bought the game yesterday and played through to what I thought might be the end (cleared the fiery circle location, beating all the enemies there) but then nothing happened. No prize, no message. Just an empty altar . There is one change: the city now gives me the option to leave the island. The "explore" option is still unavailable, though. I hesitate to leave in case I've missed something. Do I need to clear all the locations on the map?
edit:
The battles were straightforward but the statues threw me a bit: DELFS, IDIGBO, TITTLE. Also, the statues don't reveal what the word was if you didn't get it It was fun to try to guess them all the same.
That is the current end yes. More is planned later, but I can't say when that will be. There should be an unlock the first two times you do it though. Depart essentially takes you to a fresh world for a newgame+ on a new seed. The option is technically available the whole time, but costs 1000g if you've not done that fight. Explore is currently unimplemented.
Yeah, those can sometimes throw some super obscure words at you. If you check the stats, it'll tell you what they were on there. I should probably add a postgame screen to them.
No rush. I've enjoyed what I played. I look forward to seeing what you add next.
Thanks for the quick response!
Poison feels like it can become extremely unmanageable past level 2 or 3. Even with antidotes and potions or healing items, it feels like something that can easily end your run in an unfun way. Other than that, the game otherwise feels pretty fun to play
I've got plans to make enemies not always do the same damage each turn which should help mitigate that, but I'll make a note to take another look at spider balance.
Latest update should solve this.
I'm really enjoying the game! I just got to the second location. However, it seems like I can't rest at towns anymore - I get this error message and have to quit the game:
Error
overworldview.lua:255: attempt to index local 't' (a nil value)
Traceback
[love "callbacks.lua"]:228: in function 'handler'
overworldview.lua:255: in function 'doRest'
overworldview.lua:273: in function 'acceptfunction'
ui/confirm.lua:7: in function 'mousereleased'
ui/button.lua:197: in function <ui/button.lua:187>
utils/input.lua:53: in function 'relativeMouse'
main.lua:245: in function <main.lua:245>
[love "callbacks.lua"]:154: in function <[love "callbacks.lua"]:144>
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
Okay, I see the issue. It looks like you have the gilded leaf teabag, and it can't find any tiles to gild on resting. I'll add a fix for that.
The fix is out. Sorry it took a few days; busy weekend, and had a few other things I wanted to get done for this update.
Thank you so much! No worries, hope the weekend was a good one.
Hi, which english does the game dictionary use?
It accepts both UK and US spellings. A few Canadian ones too.
I myself am British, but a large portion of the audience is American. Gameplay wise the British spellings are usually worth more points, just because they are usually longer.
Oooh nice!
Came across a 5 letter shrine and couldn't figure out what the hell the word was. It ended up being ZIARA. ZIARA? Are you kidding me?!
I had to write a script to try and figure this one out lol, I don't even think it's in the dictionary.
Also, something will sometimes bug out the shines when switching between keyboard and mouse for hint guessing - when typing on keyboard it just doesn't register in the answer box, but then when you click a letter it will drop it into a later letter slot as if your key presses did put something in the earlier letters.
Looks like an Arabic loan word. I used wiktionary to cross reference all the entries, so they're in there with an English definition at least.
At a guess, when it's having issues you're either inputting upper-case, or some other letter-character other than basic lower-case latin script that it has no info on how to render. I'll add something to sanitise that input.
I have been enjoying the heck out of this. Trying to unlock all the classes, and see what all is out there.
I used the AEIOU scroll and as soon as I clicked it the whole thing caused a blue screen of death. Hoping that's was just a random bug.
Thanks for the report, I've identified and fixed the problem. I'll probably drop the fix later this evening so I can get some of the new things I'm working on in the same update.
Awesome, thanks.
also, as a suggestion maybe a crafting guide that fills in once you find a combo would be great. Or some sort of hint. I can't tell why some things are highlighted and others aren't in there.
The first one probably isn't that useful given that most crafts are permanent. I'll see if I can find a diegetic way to include some hints. though
Almost got an entire grid of wildcards.
Impressive.
Hint does not work if your only vowels come in the form of wildcards (suspect the same if they are only consonants)
Hints exclude wildcards altogether, same for the insight potions and similar. I could experiment with enabling wildcards for hints since it doesn't do a full dictionary search, although for insight potions including wildcards makes the function take about a second on my hardware, rather than a few miliseconds.
There are definitely a few ways to approach this. If you want to keep it as is, just a message displayed when the hint button fails but detects 1 or more wildcards 'hint cannot use wildcards'
I don't know what sort and search method you are using for hints, but several methods come to mind to do a search that only use a fraction of the dictionary.
Also would love to talk Kickstarter/Steam/Publishing with you if you are interested in that route. You can find me on discord under the same name.
Hints already only searched a fraction of the dictionary, and the next version uses wildcards for hints as of about 20 hours ago.
It never seemed worth specifying that it doesn't include wildcards, since if you have enough that it can't find anything outside of them, then you can probably put anything in and the wildcards will figure it out.
I've already agreed to a publishing deal with 2LeftThumbs.
Oh, congrats on the publishing!
Also, I had no idea the other colour of tiles were worth more. You said I could hover over them, but when I hovered over the silver and gold tiles nothing came up so I had no idea.
I'll add it to the questionmark button for the to left corner of that screen that I'm working on.
I'm not suggesting you implement this, as I have no idea what your underlying goal is around difficulty. But you could weight the generation of new tiles less towards vowels or consonants depending on how many of those are already present on the board. I too get boards full of I's very frequently.
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/rtatman/english-word-frequency is also a good reference
Word frequency is not a good statistical metric for a game where you care about letter frequency within words. If you use word frequency you end up drowning in H's and T's unless every other word you make is THE or contains TH. If you can track down a pre-V23 copy you can feel that first hand.
I is less common in shorter words than it is in longer words. Considering only words of 3-6 letters length it's around the 5th most common letter. Above that it's the most common letter by an increasing margin as the words get longer.
Making it less common on its own would make it harder to make 7+ letter words. Having the algorythm consider what's already on the board would be a possiblity, but that might inadvertedly nerf things like the Book of 4-heal.
As it currently stands for I, it's the third most common letter, which is a middle of the road compromise between short words and long words.
I think you misunderstand. I'm not saying base your distribution on how often these words appear, but use that as a dictionary to run your tile improvement method against.
So instead of "The new tile rarities are based on an analysis of the in-game dictionary, weighted based on source word length with a bias curving towards 7 letter words."
It would be "The new tile rarities are based on an analysis of the most used words dictionary, weighted based on source word length with a bias curving towards 7 letter words."
edit: if you do this, delete any one or two letter words in that dictionary, there is a lot of slang and bullshit there that should be removed before running an analysis.
Also, just checking you 100% have the rights to use the dictionary you're using, because hint found a unique word that isn't in oxford or scrabble dictionaries (I googled it because I'd never heard it before). ooecia - cool word, tonnes of vowels, but not in just about any dictionary used for games. (Some dictionaries include unique words to their dictionary to test if people use it without proper authorization)
This is an amazing game and everything, but is there something weighted towards the letter "I"? Every second or third adventure I see a board with 5 "I"s after a few fights, and every time I clear one or two, the game drops the same amount back on the board!
Being a vowel, I is more common than most, but it's not the most common letter. You're statistically more likely to see E or A.
You can see a breakdown of the odds in the V23 devlog.
Baldurs Gate 3 take a hike!
my fiance and I love these kinds of word games I can only hope this is a gateway drug for other roguelites for her. So thank you!
Are there plans to put this on Steam? Looks like it could be a big hit.
Yes.
I made the mistake of asking my sister if she wanted to play a scrabble rougue lite dungeon crawler. Now she thinks this is a coop scrabble game rather then the accurate description. Could be a good spin off game though.
I've considered multiplayer, but I've not come up with an idea that's distinct enough from just streaming your game to the other person to be worth the netcode. It's admittedly not been a focus of my thoughts though.
Having booting issue with the Win64 and Win 32 versions both with this error log:
Error
[love "boot.lua"]:276: conf.lua:35: attempt to call field 'getOS' (a nil value)
Traceback
[love "callbacks.lua"]:228: in function 'handler'
[C]: in function 'error'
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
Fixed.
Fastest Patch in the west, TY
It was my worst fears realised; a critical bug slipping through right before the game got some actual coverage.
Thank you for commenting, otherwise this could have been a total disaster.
Is this similar to Bookworm Adventures Correct?
Yes, it's inspired by Bookworm Adventures.
First? First.