Sorry I stopped posting, but I made another game

Introducing Word Play

Sorry I’ve been away from YouTube and Substack. Let me explain what happened!

Right, so last year I finally finished my first proper Steam game, Mind Over Magnet.

After a long and frankly torturous development period, I finished all the content, polished it up, and plopped it on Steam.

And then, with all of that game development stuff finally out of my system, the plan was to take December off, and then go back to being a full-time YouTuber in 2025.

You know, go back to having a proper, regular upload schedule.

Oh, I just had one teensy-weensy obligation to fulfill at the end of the year. Because you know the GMTK Game Jam, right? We've got a new one coming up on July 30th. Well, we've also started doing a secret second jam just for GMTK Patreon supporters.

Now that happened in December of 2024, and I had almost forgot that I had promised that I too would take part in this jam.

Oops! Okay, so I'll just make a tiny game for this jam, then take the rest of the year off, and then go back to being a YouTuber in 2025.

Okay, so the theme for this jam, which was picked by a Byzantine, Conclave-like series of suggestions and secret votes, ended up being "Bending the Rules", which gave me an idea for a game.

Basically you make a spelling game, like Boggle or Scrabble, and then when the player has scored enough points to level up, they get to unlock some kind of upgrade or modifier that changes the rules and makes it easier to spell words and score points.

Maybe you can add a few extra Z tiles to the bag, or 'Q' tiles now become 'QU' tiles, or your word scores more points if it starts with a vowel.

That sort of thing. Essentially, you combine a word game with the roguelike shenanigans of a Balatro, or a Vampire Survivors, or a Slay the Spire.

So that's what I did. I made a system that would give you a random selection of 16 letters. You can click on them to create words, and then it checks your words against a dictionary. There's a nifty open source dictionary with about 200,000 words, so it checks against that list, and if it's on there, you score points.

And then I added in some upgrades.

Multipliers for longer words, multipliers on specific letters, a wildcard that can be used in place of any letter, a powerup that lets you hold some tiles and refresh the others.

And then within just two days, I had built a game.

Now it was an ugly, slightly broken, and obviously unfinished prototype of a game, but it was something. And it was actually quite good fun.

And other people agreed. Almost everyone I showed the game to got a bit hooked. One person told me that they played this scrappy two day prototype for more hours than they spent playing the entire campaign of Mind Over Magnet. And when I posted about it in a Discord full of friends, as soon as one person posted a screenshot of their results page, everyone wanted to have a go and see how they could get on.

The game obviously had appeal.

And so I started to think, maybe I should make this into a full game.

And I know, sure, I struggled to juggle game development and being a YouTuber throughout the development of Mind Over Magnet. And I know that the plan was to stop making games and just become a full time YouTuber.

But also, what if I completely ignored all of that and just got immediately started on making another video game? What could possibly go wrong?

So while I was working on videos for GMTK, like the one on Smash Bros, and Zelda's UI, and Locator, I was secretly building this game in the background.

I threw out the prototype code and started from scratch, with the goal of making a more stable, playable, and adaptable game.

That meant adding in quality of life features like controller support, typing on the keyboard, drag and drop support, and the ability to save your run if you need to come back to it later.

It meant making things more pretty, with animations, more colour, and juicy numbers.

And it meant under the hood, the game could support all manner of different upgrades, like passive perks, active upgrades, special tiles, game-breaking synergistic stuff, the works.

So it was going well. And then I made a new video on GMTK.

It was about coming up with game ideas, and it was actually the start of a new series called Game Dev 101. A series all about the production pipeline of making your own indie game, and how I kinda screwed it up for Mind Over Magnet.

But this gave me an idea, because this new game, this word thingy, was the perfect opportunity to basically go through the development process again, and hopefully get it right this time.

I could take everything I learned from making Mind Over Magnet, and apply it to a second game with the idea of making it more quickly and efficiently. That way I could do this Game Dev 101 series with a lot more authority.

I wouldn't just have to talk about how I screwed everything up, I could also talk about how I got things right.

So that was it. At the beginning of March I decided to take two or three months off YouTube again, and get to work on finishing this game.

So I kept building. I added more modifiers and upgrades to the shop. I endlessly fixed bugs. I tweaked the numbers to nerf the game-breaking power-ups and to buff the rubbish stuff. Added in some really fun perks, like a glass tile that can be used to temporarily clone a letter. Or modifiers that build up score over time.

And every time I added a perk, the game got better.

And the more time I spent playing the game, the more I understood what made it fun. Which is basically, if the game is just "find the longest word in this grid" over and over again, well that quickly gets boring. So I had to add in things to mix that up. Like make shorter words, use specific letters, don't use letters, and so on.

That's when the game gets really good.

I also added in special rounds, kind of like the boss blinds in Balatro. These have unique requirements that force you to play in a special way. Like your word must have six tiles to score. Or you've got to use this specific letter. Or the tiles refresh every turn.

Those break up the game loop and change the game from just "spell the longest word".

I also playtested the game endlessly. I took the game to universities where I was doing talks, to game dev meetups, and the biggest one, GDC in San Francisco.

When I was there, I would spend all day showing the game to different people and talking about the design and the balancing and the onboarding and everything else.

Then I'd go back to my hotel, crash, wake up at 3am because of jet lag, and then immediately apply all of the feedback from yesterday's sessions before going back onto the expo floor.

It was pretty exhausting. But I made some critical changes to the game during that time.

For instance, initially I thought that the player should be penalised if they spell a word that's not in the dictionary. Like if you spell a wrong word, you should lose some points. Right? But everyone hated this. Especially those who don't speak English as their first language, or they have dyslexia, or they're just bad at spelling.

It never felt good to be penalised for that.

And also sometimes you have a word that you really think is a word, but it's not in my specific dictionary, and the game just goes "too bad, lose some points, game over". It just didn't feel good. So I took that out and, yeah, the game was much better for it.

But I also tried to filter out feedback that went against the type of game I was going for.

For instance, some people asked for the game to have a cartoon mascot or a more distinct art style. But I'm happy with the slick, clean, minimalist style. It's like a video game version of a GMTK video.

And others asked for the sort of crazy, game-breaking synergies you get in Balatro, with the possibility of scoring essentially infinite points. But I'm going for more of a tabletop, Scrabble-esque game with smaller, easier to digest numbers.

Anyway, back home I was also posting about the game on Discord, and I showed a video of some of the animations. And then a user called Tunote decided to use it for sound design practice.

It made me say, "Damn, that's pretty good. Can I just pay you to make all the sounds for this game?" And so now this game has a sound designer. Oh, and I also reached out to Zach Jones, who did the epic soundtrack for Mind Over Magnet, and he's now hard at work on the music for this game.

And then the game just sort of came together, and it's now almost done.

I just have one last goal, and that's to bring the total number of perks up to 100. That feels like a nice round number to put on the Steam page. And as of this post I have 88 made. 12 more to go.

And so, yeah. The game is called Word Play.

It's a word-spelling, score-chasing, perk-choosing roguelike, and I'm super proud of it.

It's really fun, it's really slick, and it's really addictive.

Trust me, it's really hard for me to bug test this game because even if I go in looking for some specific thing to fix, I just end up playing the game for like half an hour.

And look, I know that this isn't the first game about words, or the first roguelike word game, or the first game to mash up Balatro with a board game.

But I'm still super happy with my version, and I hope you check it out.

So if you head to Steam right now, you can play a free demo of Word Play.

It's super short, it's just got one mode and about a quarter of the total perks in the game, but it should give you a pretty good idea of what the game will be like when it launches later this summer.

Also while you're there, make sure you wishlist the game on Steam, as that is the number one way of telling the Steam algorithm to push my game to the top of the charts when it launches on the store.

You'll also get an email as soon as the game launches, and as per usual there'll be a launch day discount to get the game at a super cheap price.

I also totally plan to do a mobile version. The game works beautifully on an iPad, so I'll put it on the App Store and the Google Play Store at some point.

I guess I'll do ads or in-app purchases or something. I don't really want to do that, but paid apps don't really work on those stores. If you work at Netflix and want to buy the rights to the mobile version of this game, call me.

But yeah, I'm really pleased to say that the game has come together in record time.

I made the first prototype at the end of December. I started the new version in January and February. I took the game to GDC in March. In April I, uh, oh yeah, broke my goddamn arm. That was annoying. That slowed me down. But then in May I basically finished the game, ready for release in June or July depending on Next Fest and when Zach finishes the music and stuff like that.

I'll talk more about these stages in future episodes of Game Dev 101, which is, as I say, pretty much exactly what I did this game for.

But now I really can go back to being a YouTuber.

Because here's the thing. When I was showing this game to people at events like GDC or Guadalinde in Málaga, I talked to so many people who told me that GMTK was really important and influential to them.

That my YouTube channel had changed their life in some way.

Perhaps the videos got them interested in game design and led them to study the subject at school. Or that watching me make my own game in Unity inspired them to do the same. If this bozo can do it, so can you. Or that their GMTK Game Jam entry turned into a full game and now they have a studio,

And so as much as I like making video games, I really have enjoyed this process, I feel like I can do so much more on YouTube.

It's the difference between making a handful of games myself, or inspiring people to make hundreds of games. Or, let's be honest, looking at the game jam, tens of thousands of games.

So while I will definitely make more games, I want to enter game jams and I want to do interactive video essay type stuff like Platformer Toolkit and other GMTK adjacent things, I think this really is the end of me making big proper games.

I say that now, I will probably be back here in six months.

But that's how I feel right now.

So thank you so much for your patience, especially thank you to my Patrons who have been there while I have not been making videos because I've been working on games. Thanks for checking in, and thanks for finding out about Word Play.

You can wishlist the game on Steam and it will come to other platforms, iOS and Android, eventually.

Until then, I just want to say see you soon, thanks for checking in, and have a tremendous day.