Word Game DevLog: Day 5

(Check out the first 4 days here)

It’s Thursday! Party time!

In these devlogs I’m trying to avoid describing the core mechanic of the game; I’m not absolutely certain it’s final and I’m still experimenting. So if things seem a bit vague: don’t worry! It’s intentional.

I didn’t get a whole lot done today. Probably only put in about 2 hours of work, but that’s allright. The big changes for today? A brand new game mode, and some tweaks to the scoring and gameplay start/end. Most exciting though: solidified an artistic relationship!

Artistic design in games

I want to stress here that I put a huge amount of value in artistic direction, and significantly less value in actual artistic execution. Not to be unfair to the more artistically minded, but to be frank: a simple artist is a dime-a-dozen. I get emails from talented folk on a monthly basis; all they need to work is a specific direction, and plenty of hand holding.

For example, you might ask for an image of a penguin. The artists in question might say “sure! but… How big should the beak be? Should the eyes be big or small? What palette do you want to use?”… The level of hand-holding here is very aggravating. It’s like the easiest way to communicate is to just mock-up all the art assets myself and just have them draw over it, but better.

And that’s exactly what I don’t want. Sure, I have preferences and intended artistic themes for my games. But I also have enough experience to know I don’t know what’s best, and I should just shut the hell up and leave it to the pros. This is one of the reasons that I fawn over amazing designers like Greg Wohlwend and Dan Cook so much:  They can completely design – from the ground up – a projects entire image, and execute on it  with amazing talent and precision. I wish I knew appropriate artistic lingo to drool over them professionally.

Another name to add to that list is Sven Bergström - an indie developer with a lot of passion from South Africa. I’d say he’s a newcomer, a rising star on the horizon – but really he’s just new to my personal network; he’s been making games for longer than I have, and knows a lot more about – oh, let’s say mobile development, than I do. I wish I knew he existed sooner! He’s the one that helped revamp the visual design on my personal blog here a few months ago, and he’s super talented in all that he does. I’m excited to have him on board!

Sven just started working on this mysteriously-titled “Word Game” yesterday, and I asked if he could put together an image to share with you.

Check that out! Character design for the game. This is the first stage of evolution for our lead character! I love reading about this kind of stuff. I learned things today about character design!

Two types of player

When I take a look at most word games, there seems to be two camps.

On one side is the person that likes to find long words. These are the people that like Boggle, or a lazy Sunday spent staring at a Scrabble board. In the mobile space, you pretty much just look at the games that have no time limits or external pressures. The goal is to be your best. I like to put SpellTower in this category.

On the other side is the person that likes action, and would be just as happy dazzling you with an array of 3-letter-words. These types of players tend to play the faster-paced, more hectic games. Games like PuzzleJuice, or tournament Speed Scrabble. Sure, there’s bonuses in it if you have long words, but the score to be gained by just going fast is the prime target here.

I like both styles of play, and I’ve been trying to work them into a single game mode. This has been failing! Balancing long words versus big “combo multipliers” is very tricky indeed. I fought my urges to unite these two camps and instead built a second mode into the game.

Now, without changing any mechanics (just the scoring algorithm), I have two different game modes: one that rewards long words, and one that rewards lots of small words in rapid succession.

The jarring end

One thing that is a common occurance in word games is that brick-wall ending. Maybe you have a word half-spelled, maybe you are massaging your temples as your brain cascades through all the potential letter combinations. Then BAM! The game suddenly ends, your tiles disappear, and you are left holding nothing.

I think this ending is hugely anti-climatic and I really dislike it. I reworked the game to instead allow you one more super-move after the timer expires. Sure, you can sit there for as long as you want and hunt down the best possible word – but in Speed mode, your combo multiplier soon runs out and you’ll not gain much for it. In LongWord mode, it’s the final cherry on top of your sundae.

I’m playtesting this new feature now; I hope some variant of it will stay make it into the final game.

On a smaller, but similar note: the big mean ol’ nasty countdown clock doesn’t start ticking until you’ve actually made your first word. Terrain in this game changes a lot in just a few seconds, so being able to plan out your first move isn’t a huge advantage.

Other odds & ends

I got TestFlight setup so I can start an actual iOS closed-beta program for the game, and get some feedback before launch. I also made my first iPhone build (so far it’s been iPad only) and I was very pleased to see that the game was simulating nicely without any modifications at all. I’ll have to actually see it on-device before I declare it a success, though.

There’s a few mobile-specific features in the game now too; things I consider housekeeping: rotation locks, proper (mockup) icons and loading images, pivot behaviour hooks, specific code for android “back” button mis-presses, and customary stuff like remembering to pause the countdown timer if you swap out of the game (and reducing the game to 1FPS in the background, so it doesn’t suck up your battery). Whenever folks talk about mobile development having a lot more “gotchas,” this kind of work makes it seem very true. However, I did all of these tweaks in about 30 minutes of code. The only trouble they’ll give anyone is if they simply forget about them before launch!

I think the most notable thing about today is that I spent way more time playtesting than I did coding. I think that’s a very good sign.