Outer Words

It started as a joke. Somebody mixed up "Outer Wilds" and "The Outer Worlds". "Just wait until Outer Words is released", someone said. 
"I can't believe that doesn't exist", mused someone else. "Surely some random person would put out some joke game named that."

Hi, I'm Meanwhile Games, and I am that random person. Outer Words is a joke gone too far. It's a prototype of a spelling game with orbital mechanics, and it's... actually pretty fun!

Control your ship to select letters that spawn randomly and orbit the sun. If you form a word, the letters explode and you get points based on the word's length!

There are some known issues that I'm not proud of, but weren't really necessary to address for the purposes of a prototype, so I left them be:

• There's no sound. It's set in space, and there's no sound in space, so, uh, that's definitely an intentional design decision. Definitely.
• There's no way to spell longer words that start with smaller words (ex. you can't spell "TENT" because it matches "TEN" first).
•  You can fly through the sun. This is fine.
•  You can also fly off into space and lose your ship.
• The dictionary is weird and doesn't contain a lot of words that seem like they should be valid and also does contain things that I'm pretty sure aren't real words. This is just a prototype so I'm at the mercy of free dictionaries available to me.
• There's no end game condition; you basically just play until you're bored.

Special credits to:

• Kenney's assets for space sprites
• This GitHub repository with a list of the 10,000 most common English words according to Google's database.
• Connor Shearwood of Shearwood Games for his help with orbital mechanics! In fact, he's got a Kickstarter campaign going right now, at time of writing, for a board game about orbital mechanics! The board has segments that physically spin so your pieces orbit around the sun. You should definitely check it out.
• The fine folks on the Game Maker's Toolkit Patreon Discord server. Without their pun proficiency, the concept of this game would never have existed.
• Outer Wilds, an incredible and unique game about exploring a solar system and unraveling an ancient mystery.
• The Outer Worlds, a game from the creators of classic Fallout and Fallout: New Vegas, set in space. I haven't actually played this one, but I hear it's pretty good!