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 [...] Keep Reading

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. [...] Keep Reading

When i say that Spellirium is a cross between Loom and Boggle, i ain’t just whistling Dixie. Brian Moriarty’s adventure game masterpiece, which was so classy with its use of a Tchaikovsky soundtrack, remains one of my favourite games of all time. It turns out, as i reveal in the video, that i didn’t rip [...] Keep Reading

One of the biggest gameplay innovations in Spellirium is that beyond including a certain word puzzle mechanic, each challenge and battle is actually a unique and distinct puzzle-within-a-puzzle. By “reading” the player’s actions in the puzzle grid, we end up with a number of data points including word length, colour, quality and direction. There are [...] Keep Reading

After players complained that the previous Spellirium prototype was too laborious when it came to building words, we reversed the click scheme for Prototype 2a. We knew, by this point, that we wanted the player to be able to rearrange the word grid in Spellirium, and we knew the player had to be able to [...] Keep Reading