IntroIt's been around 4 months since I released my last game (2+ years in the making!) on Steam. I've been focusing on school and taking a break from gamedev for the most part. In the last couple of weeks I came up with a new idea and I'm rolling with it!
InspirationA couple weeks back, the local
Adam Corey spoke at a gamedev meetup about mobile gamedev, highlighting several awesome games I'd never heard of. Fast forward a week, my parents leave for a trip and my mom asks if we can play some online game with each other while she's gone. I shoot Adam a message, and he recommends
Capitals. I like it, she likes it, we end up playing each other for weeks after the trip is over. My brother trounces me when we start playing, and explains the basic strategy. Short words are often much, much better than long, clever ones!
Suddenly I'm disappointed.
So I'm gonna make my own word game [with Blackjack and hookers] where clever plays are enabled and rewarded. And let's throw in magic for good measure. Title: Lettromancy? Oh,
Literomancy is already a word? Sick. Now it's about seeing the future.
Core Mechanic & Design Principles"A word after a word after a word is power." —Margaret Atwood, "Spelling"
- Every word played is a spell. Spells expand and steal territory like in Capitals, or give the player more information about the board.
- Different character classes introduce fake spell words into that player's dictionary, with unique abilities.
- Creative words should almost be always better than short, boring ones.
- The player can access different layers of information about how the board will look in the future.
- The player can skillfully manipulate the board to enable better moves in the long run.
- The game will still be simple enough that I can still play with my mom.
Development RoadmapThe idea is for this to be a relatively short project, between 2-3 months in the best case scenario. My original vision was a mobile app, but a friend convinced me I'm better off starting it as a basic HTML5/PHP game using SQL to manage games online. Lower barrier to entry for players, and less hurdles for me to jump through!
Since it's a mobile game at heart, I'll probably slap ads on it at some point. Once that happens, maybe I'll migrate it to itch.io or someplace where I can manage IAP to remove the ads. Player classes/skins/etc. are other possible ways to sell the game's soul.
An app isn't out of the question if it does well, but I'd rather deal with that $100 Apple developer fee later!
Update #1I started by writing some very simple JavaScript to handle the game's word validation. Chris Hart, the same friend who convinced me to make it a webgame, has a
Palindrome Generator online and let me nab the dictionary code from that to kickstart my prototyping.
Then I went about coding a simple square grid which renders through an HTML5 canvas. Today I added color to the grid cells, and wrote some code so you can actually chain letters together by clicking on them. (The board is hard-coded for now. You can spell "CAT", "ACT", or even "TACK"!!)
"TA" is a word??