Poetry Slammers V3 -- Adding animation and clarification

Today I'm continuing my discussion of prototype patch notes for Poetry Slammers. Today: version three! 

Overall, the goal remained to help boost the charm of the game, and while creating fully animated characters wasn't in my grasp, I decided to make it a bit like the old web game gifs of the 90's where you imply animation through four or five character poses. The other option would have been to separate out arms, legs, and other features, then tween them between positions, but that seemed like a stretch for both me and ChatGPT.

Also, I had ChatGPT build a design tool where I could simply select the images I want, and it would build the animation and animators for me rather than having to do it manually. Having this tool would also help me ensure future characters in the pipeline would be simpler to animate as well.

Poetry Slammers Character Animation Builder Inside Unity

Beyond this, I had received a bit of feedback from a friend that thought my "10 cent words" would actually cost them 10-cents of real money, so I reworded them to be "Star Words." I also figured the phrase "10 cent words" was a dated phrase/concept that a lot of people just wouldn't get. 

Star Words, plurals, and possessives . . . a joy's private butterscotch . . .

Thirdly, not being able to make words plural or possessive was really bugging me, so I added a feature to put them in and sense when they were used. It's still a bit funny since you can pluralize plural words or make possessive words doubly possessive, which I suppose adds a kind of quirkiness that already exists in regular magnet poetry. 

When the oils soil and somehow prove the zephyr's rules . . .

Noting that I kept making longer and longer fridge poems because I was buying so many Star Words, I decided to add a button to collapse all the words and make space for more words. (I would eventually improve on that idea in the next build . . . more on that tomorrow . . .)

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Update notes v.003

This update focuses on making the poem board more expressive, playable, and fun to use while adding new character animations.

• Character Animations
• Poets and judges now feel more alive during performances. Characters can idle, speak during poem narration, and celebrate after a strong performance.
• Star Words
• The old “10-cent word” idea has been reworked into Star Words.
• Players can now use the Get Star Words button to spend a star and receive a fancy, flavorful word magnet for their poem. 
• When used, the button displays a small -1 Star popup, so the cost is clear.
• New Suffix Magnets
• Two new magnets have been added to the punctuation row:
• s
• 's
• These attach to the word immediately before them when the poem is performed.
• Examples:
• cat + s becomes cats
• box + s becomes boxes
• wish + s becomes wishes
• poet + 's becomes poet's
• Align Magnets Button
• A new Align Magnets button has been added to the poem board.
• This button tidies up the current poem by arranging placed magnets into cleaner rows while preserving their reading order. It also accounts for larger Star Word magnets so long words fit more naturally on the board.
• Better Parts of Speech Recognition
• The game’s part-of-speech categories were repaired and cleaned up.
• This improves random word generation and helps prepare the game for stronger poem-building and future judge systems.
• Other Improvements
• Improved poem text formatting during performance.
• Several UI buttons have been updated to better match the cute, crafted visual style.

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Happy Dueling!