Spellirium
Jun
20
2013
0i’ve made no secret of the fact that my favourite video game of all time is The Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, and that i’m a big fan of Ron Gilbert, who i once touched. Ron has released a new pirate-themed mobile game called Scurvy Scallywags which, along with the Puzzle Quest series and the more...
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Jun
1
2013
0November through January, in both 2012 and 2013, were rough times for me. Those same three months, a year apart, had me crunching harder than the breakfast cereal Cap’n.
A typical day went like this:
Wake up (barely) at 10 or 11am. Open the laptop next to the bed.
Work from bed. No shower, no breakfast …...
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May
4
2013
0Are 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...
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May
3
2013
0“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...
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May
2
2013
0There 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...
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May
1
2013
0The 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...
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Apr
30
2013
0By 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”,...
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Apr
29
2013
0i 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...
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Apr
28
2013
0Spellirium’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,...
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Apr
27
2013
0One 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...
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