Spellirium

Spellirium Minute Episode #14: This Game Looks Like Garbage

Ryan Henson Creighton — Sat, 04 May 2013 03:01:08 +0000

Are you like me? Do you love the look of stuff made out of trash? If so, feast your eyes on today’s Spellirium Minute episode, which reveals a little more of the source material that i provided to the game’s artists to achieve that junky-fab trashpunk aesthetic.

The Mystic’s house and the city of New Mound are two locations where this look really shines through. Later in the game, you explore a dilapidated shanty town on a polluted and an Ewok-esque treehouse village. If you like what you’ve seen in the Spellirium screenshots, rest assured there’s a lot more where that came from!

Subscribe Por Favor

If you love Spellirium, it would help me out a lot if you upvoted it on the Steam Greenlight page? Or check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

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Spellirium Minute Episode #13: Trashpunk’s Not Dead

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 03 May 2013 03:00:49 +0000

“Trashpunk” is the term i’m co-opting to describe the aesthetic in Spellirium. It stems from “cyberpunk”, which describes not only an aesthetic but an ethos, and “steampunk”, which drops the ethos to describe only an aesthetic. (But what an aesthetic!)

Today’s Spellirium Minute talks about the visual references that informed the trashpunk look of the game. They include Jean-Pierre Jeunet (City of Lost Children, Delicatessen, Amelie), Terry Gilliam (Twelve Monkeys, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), The Dark Crystal and The Princess Bride. Easily at home on the list would be Labyrinth which, in addition to featuring a character made out of junk, features a whole lot of David Bowie’s junk.

Help Me Out by Subscribing

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Spellirium Minute Episode #12: The Renaissance

Ryan Henson Creighton — Thu, 02 May 2013 03:03:16 +0000

There i was, sitting alone in my office. The government funding had been spent, and the quality of the work i had commissioned from a hastily-assembled team was just not up to snuff. i didn’t like the way Spellirium was looking or playing. i had no money or time to finish it. And i didn’t want to finish it.

But when our background artist Greg Brown came on board, the project turned a corner. Suddenly, the vision i had for the game was being realized. Suddenly, i could see Spellirium as a finished product. And lo, it was glorious.

Help Me Out by Subscribing

i use the royal “we” a lot when referring to Untold, but by and large, it’s just me over here. There are lots of little things you can do to help me out. Why not upvote Spellirium on the Steam Greenlight page? Or check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

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Spellirium Minute Episode #11: vs. Jimmy McGinley

Ryan Henson Creighton — Wed, 01 May 2013 03:02:27 +0000

The idiom of not being able to see the forest for the trees applies in spades to game development. You tend to get so close to your creation that you can no longer make good decisions about it. That was the case when Jimmy McGinley and i had our Battle Royale over a very small, but very significant change to the Spellirium game mechanic.

Thankfully, Jimmy’s suggestion to allow freedom of tile swappage made the difference between a not-very-fun game and a very-fun-game.

Jimmy McGinley Would Probably Subscribe

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

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Spellirium Minute Episode #10: Fuzzy Wuzzy was a Puzzle

Ryan Henson Creighton — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 03:01:02 +0000

By the time we’d reached prototype 5 of Spellirium, i was pretty confident in the concept. We went ahead and prototyped around twenty different puzzles to put them out to players and to see which ones stuck, and which ones were Fit for the Pit.

As the video reveals, the most popular puzzle was “Picture”, so we put it in the current game such that players would be playing it again and again. But our implementation was a bear, and it turned out to be a level of work akin to fighting through a 100-level randomized dungeon in order to power up a single, consumable health potion in Disgaea. We’re going to be less heavy-handed with the Picture puzzle in future revisions of the alpha.

SUBSCRIBE, and Prove that you are Noble of Heart

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

Word.

Spellirium Minute Episode #9: Ridictionary

Ryan Henson Creighton — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 03:00:06 +0000

i had never ever seen a word game like Spellirium, in which the Dictionary of fifty thousand-odd words is collectible and exposed to the player, AND collecting those words has some sort of bearing on gameplay – in Spellirium’s case, those words become your currency. To pull that off, the real trick was going to be organizing the UI (user interface) for the Dictionary in an enticing – not overwhelming – way.

Well, Mission Totally Failed during our first attempt, which we outline in the video. Based on that initial UI failure, we made the following critical changes to the Dictionary that you’ll find in the current version of Spellirium:

By default, the Dictionary filters by words you’ve already made. So the first time you open the Dictionary, you see it filled with words that you recognize, because you just finished building them in a challenge.
Instead of only two word states (“got it” and “don’t got it”), there are now four states: unseen, seen, owned, and spent. You can filter the Dictionary using any of those parameters for more or less granularity.
There’s a cheeky % complete counter at the bottom of the current dictionary, which usually says something like “0.0017% complete”. This is almost there to dissuade players from building all fifty thousand words because, come on … get a life.
There are two Cheeves in the game related to collecting words. One of them is called “You’re Almost There”, which rewards you for completing 2% of the Dictionary The other one is for 100% completion, but it implores you NOT to achieve it, offers you no reward, and encourages you to get out and join a community group instead.

SUBSCRIBE is Not in the Dictionary…

… but it’s in our hearts. Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

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Spellirium Minute Episode #8: 20% Chance of Reins

Ryan Henson Creighton — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 03:01:04 +0000

Spellirium’s third prototype is nearly identical to the mechanic the game presently uses. But the moment you tell a player not to go somewhere, that’s the first thing a player tries to do. It’s the Garden of Eden all over again. The limits of this prototype became very obvious very quickly.

In the video, i tease a fight i had with a fellow game dev. It’s actually not going to be mentioned in the very next video, but it is upcoming, so watch out for it!

No Limits on Subscription (nudgehint)

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

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How to Tell the Internet About Your New YouTube Video

Ryan Henson Creighton — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 03:11:29 +0000

One element of my effort to drive awareness of our Spellirium Pre-Order crowdfunding campaign is a series of video developer diaries called Spellirium Minute. i had always wanted to produce video diary content, but i worried about all the effort involved in shooting and editing the videos together. In this article, i hope to convey that creating the video is the easy part.

i Post This Video Every Day

Robby “the Doogs” Duguay has been a big supporter of the campaign so far. Last week, he sat down with me and we banged out eighteen Spellirium Minute developer diary videos. All of them are short, screencapped vids about two minutes apiece, in which i talk about different design processes during the five long years we’ve been building the game. The videos contain info about our prototype regimen, communication with artists, and the inspiration that led to the project. They make for interesting viewing, and of course i’d like to get them out to as many people as possible.

Hey, hippies! Wanna watch a video?

i have enough content to release one video every day for the duration of the campaign. What i didn’t realize was the enormous chunk of every morning that would be taken up promoting each video. This is the process i follow from the moment i hit that “Upload” button on YouTube:

Prepping the Video on YouTube

Write a video description. Make sure to include a link to Spellirium off the top. If the video references a playable game prototype or a blog article, add a link to it at the bottom of the description.
Write as many tags as my little mind can fathom. This improves searchability.

(my little mind can’t actually fathom very many tags)
Fix the auto-caption track to create an English closed caption track. i have no idea if this improves searchability, but i do it anyway. Even with only two minutes of video, it is an asspain.
Create a custom thumbnail for the video and upload it.
Add an annotation to the end of the video linking to the previous video.
Add an annotation to the end of the previous video linking to this video.
Write a little note to subscribers.
Launch the sucker.
Cue up the video and add it to the Spellirium Minute playlist.

Shouting From the Rooftops

From there, i have to pull a million different levers to get the link out to a bunch of different nooks and crannies:

The Untold Entertainment blog. Every post must contain, at a minimum, a link to the Spellirium campaign, a link to the Spellirium Minute playlist, and a link to the Untold Entertainment YouTube channel with a call to action to subscribe, because subscriptions are a big deal on YouTube. They’re like your mailing list, and they’re how YouTube determines your worth as a content creator.

This is what posting daily video content has done to my blog traffic this past week.
Ensure that the Untold blog post uses the tag “Spellirium”, so that a plugin will automatically repost to the developer diary at Spellirium.com
Tweet the blog article with embedded video out to both the @Untoldent and @Spellirium Twitter accounts
Post the video link to Facebook under my personal Ryan Henson Creighton account, and on the Spellirium Facebook page. i haven’t been posting on the Untold Entertainment Facebook page, but i probably should.
Post an Announcement on the Spellirium Steam Greenlight page.
Post to the Spellirium backers-only message boards, and
the Spellirium press kit page, and
the Spellirium wiki (for posterity) and
the Spellirium subreddit (which we had to create because Redditors kept deleting our links)
Email the vid to the guys at Evolve PR, who are helping us out with the campaign.

TIGSource

There’s a Spellirium thread on the TIGSource forums that i update regularly. But TIGSource is a rare and precious snowflake that operates differently from many other sites. For example, the forum doesn’t let you embed YouTube videos (PLEASE let me know if i’m wrong about that), and it uses a phpBB/wiki-style markup. Here’s the painful process of posting there:

Screencap the video.
Upload the image to my server, since the TIGSource forums don’t let you upload images (again, if i’m wrong, please let me know.)
Copy/paste the content of the Untold blog post in a new reply to the TIGSource thread
Meticulously go through the post and rewrite the HTML markup as phpBB markup (if anyone knows a handy conversion tool that will do this for me, PLEASE let me know! It’s not quite painful enough to make me write my own convertor, but it’s getting there)
Point to the uploaded image of the YouTube video
Link it to the YouTube video
Change the Reply title
Change the Thread title

Finally, since Twitter is easily our largest referrer, i make sure to schedule or post repeated announcements throughout the day, since Twitter is only effective if people happen to see your link float by in their feed when they’re looking at Twitter.

Comb hair. Brush teeth. Promote video.

(who am i kidding? i don’t have time to comb my hair)

This is the routine i run through every morning, which actually begins the night before at midnight EST when i post the video to YouTube and Twitter only (partly for my Australian friends, and partly for fear that i’ll sleep in the next morning and completely miss my promotional window for the Eastern Standard Time breakfast crowd). Another key repost time is 11:30/12:00 PM EST, which is the double-whammy of lunchtime break for EST people and breakfast for PST people.

We’ve also created some “special” videos which took longer to shoot and required more effort, but they’re there to sort of break away from the sameness of the screencapped vids, and to hopefully enjoy some viral sharing. The last “special” video we posted showed me pointlessly demoing the 2D Spellirium game on the 3D Oculus Rift. Today’s special is a Spellirium-styled parody of the Pokémon Rap:

The punchline is that through all of this, my video strategy is not working. Just take a quick look at the abysmal double-digit views each video is pulling.

Over the past week, with one video going up every single day, and despite a big push from Kotaku that brought over 5000 people to the first vid, YouTube accounts for a whole 27 visits to the Spellirium campaign. However, that’s more eyeballs than articles on certain big press sites have brought us. Our conversion rate is high at 64%, and our lowest-priced and most popular tier is $15. If my i-flunked-high-school-math calculations are correct, the entire week-long YouTube effort has been worth roughly $275 to us so far. But maybe it’s a slow burn?

i’m Taking Requests

You’ll notice that despite all of this hustling, i’m still really only hitting a lot of insular locations. Where’s Google+? Where’s Dailymotion/Metacafe/Vimeo? There are so many more places on the Internatz. My blast radius is still quite close to home, and i haven’t yet discovered many great places to share these videos that draw a potential audience from far and wide. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Maybe then, i’ll have to spend the entire day promoting these videos, instead of “just” the entire morning.

Spellirium Minute Episode #7: The Dictionary Rap

Ryan Henson Creighton — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 03:11:25 +0000

Pokémon has a collectible compendium of creatures. Spellirium has a collectible Dictionary of words. Every original Pokémon teevee show ended with the Pokémon Rap. And what’s better than the Pokémon Rap? Practically everything.

Robby “the Doogs” Duguay is responsible for the bang-on musical homage, while you can thank Jon Remedios for the chorus that’ll stay in your brain far, far longer than you’ll want it to.

Spell all the words!

Subscribe to All the Videos!

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

Word.

Spellirium Minute Episode #6: Mo Letters Mo Problems

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 03:02:52 +0000

Just to illustrate the diversity and divergent thinking of the puzzles in Spellirium, we prototyped a battle with a creature called a “flobbert”:

This challenge is interesting because it implores the player to not excel, by word game standards. By making longer, more difficult words, the player gets into more trouble with a harder-hitting monster.

The flobbert hasn’t made it into the current game, but if it does, it will probably be based on this slimy design:

The creature’s name will have to be changed, though, because it’s eight letters long. i’d like all the creatures’ names to be spellable in the game grid, because reasons.

Superscribe!

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

Word.