For the past several years, Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit has hosted a Game Jam every summer. While I’ve never participated, and don’t plan to, I’ve enjoyed seeing what many of the different development teams come up with. There is so much creativity born out of the 48 hour time restriction as developers scramble to create a working prototype around whatever the jam’s theme happens to be.

For as interesting as the game submissions can be, there’s something I’m more keen to see: which prototypes that will go on to become full-sized releases. The 2022 hit Rollerdrome was one such game. That was actually a big part of why I originally wanted to play it. And even I can admit that Rollerdrome was novel, and had several neat ideas despite my not getting on with it.

That brings us to today’s subject: Word Factori. This was formerly known as simply Factori, and was selected as one of the top 20 game ideas from Mark’s GMTK Game Jam 2021. Unsurprisingly, the folks at Star Garden Games went on to expand the idea, and released a demo last week for the full game. I took the opportunity to play through the demo, and was blown away. Word Factori was one of the few demos I checked out during Summer Game Fest where I immediately wanted more. It’s brilliantly designed, and needs to be on more people’s radar.

Creating the word OX in Word Factori.

But first – what is it?

Word Factori is a puzzle game where you combine shapes to make words. You start with a straight line (the I character), and have to flip, rotate, and combine those lines in a variety of ways to make the different letters of the English alphabet.

The premise of Word Factori sounds simple enough, but I was initially confused by how the player would actually create different letters. As such, let’s walk through an example to examine the process.

A prompt to make the word IVY.

You can see here we have to create the word ivy. So we need to make I, V, and Y characters. To start, we can build an I factory, and send the default output straight to the I receiver. The factory gives us an I, and that’s all we need for our first value at the top. Easy Peasy.

Creating an I for IVY.

Next we need to create a V. The V shape is 2 lines that intersect at an angle. Luckily, we have a combiner that mashes 2 characters together, and when we give it 2 straight lines then it outputs a V shaped character.

Creating a V for IVY.

From here, it should be easy to make a Y character. It’s just a V shape mounted atop a straight line. We can place another combiner, and feed it V characters, and I characters to get a new Y output.

Creating a Y for IVY.

That’s the basic premise of Word Factori – you break letters down into their constituent shapes, and try to figure out how you can contort a bunch of straight lines to create said shape. The premise is dead simple, but it leads to a lot of fun puzzle solving as you mix, and match different inputs while trying to work out what combination will produce the desired output.

Once you solve the prompt, you’ll be shown a stats screen comparing your results to those of other players online. For me this is where the game really begins. Throughout my time with the demo, I kept trying to figure out how to make my operations run in perfect harmony. I didn’t want to have any excess – everything had to be produced just as it was needed. This often required a lot of moving the structures I’d placed around the board so they’d take shorter, or longer while creating their output. Eventually, I would find equilibrium, and it felt great seeing my terrible abomination of a factory spit out words in perfect harmony.

Making our IVY factory run as efficiently as possible in Word Factori.

If that doesn’t suit your fancy, there are also parameters that measure how few structures, or how few cycles your solution takes to finish. Either way, you’ll have plenty of options for tweaking your solution if you’re at all unsatisfied with your first kick at the can.

Normally, I don’t find titles like this very compelling, but Word Factori really managed to get its hooks in me. I think a big part of that likely stems from how tangible the inputs, and outputs are. The whole of Word Factori is built around shapes, so there’s a clear through line for why different shapes are interacting the way that they are. This removes a lot of the abstraction that tends to bog this style of puzzle game down, which is a huge plus in my books.

I also got excited about making a T for the first time. Word Factori does such a good job of presenting the process of creating each letter as its own interesting puzzle to solve. This leads to a ton of “ah ha” moments that sit at the root of why games in this genre are so satisfying to play.

Creating a CAT in Word Factori.

After finishing the demo, I am very much looking forward to playing more Word Factori later this year. What was showcased was incredibly engaging, and I can’t wait to figure out how to create the rest of the alphabet across the full release. Word Factori is likely going to be one of 2023’s best puzzlers, and you should absolutely have it on your radar.

But you don’t have to take my word for it – you can play the demo right now yourself. I don’t know how much longer it’ll be up, so give Word Factori a look if what I’ve said sounds interesting. I promise this is one you won’t want to miss.