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 [...] Keep Reading

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, [...] Keep Reading

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”, [...] Keep Reading

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 [...] Keep Reading

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 [...] Keep Reading