We are very happy to announce our first project, Wordcery: Curse of the Diretome for the iPad.

“In this role-playing word game, you must use your vocabulary vigor to destroy the evil forces of the Diretome. Call forth powerful spells and wield a mass of magical treasures to aid you in your quest. A battle of wits, words, and magic awaits you in Wordcery: Curse of the Diretome. “

The idea of Wordcery is very simple. Each player is given 7 letters and must take turns spelling words in order to deal damage and defeat their opponent. Players can also cast spells and use a wide variety of items to aid in battle.

When a word is placed on the board, its letters can sometimes trigger special runes on the playing field. These runes give the player a powerful bonus. There are three different kinds of runes:

Rune of Might: Doubles the power of the letter that lands on the rune.

Rune of Magic: Charges a random spell in the players spellbook for use in battle.

Rune of Riches: Gain gold equal to the letter that lands on the rune.

Positioning yourself to activate the most amount of runes is a good way of vanquishing your foe.

In addition to the runes, there are a number of spells that can change the tide of battle at any moment. Blast your opponent with a Meteor Strike or choose which letters you wish to have in your hand with a Flash of Brilliance. A fully charged spellbook is a dangerous thing indeed.

Is your opponent being a greedy wizard and hogging all the Runes of Magic? Thanks to The Bazaar, you can use your hard earned gold to purchase items to use in battle. Not as powerful as the spells, but these gizmos and doodads will get you out of a pinch when you need it the most.

Critical strikes, backstabs, and spellstrikes are also a big part of Wordcery, but thats a story for another time.

Follow us on Twitter @insaneroot for the most up to date news on Wordcery!

-M

 

 

Of all the design documents I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot) my favorite would have to be David Jaffe’s for Calling all Cars. You can see his blog post here with links to his design document. It’s incredibly simple. He isn’t trying to design every single thing or solve every problem. It’s a very basic, broad stroke. If your design document has a table of contents, delete it and start over.

In my opinion, design documents are useless most of the time. I’m not saying that they don’t serve a purpose, I’m saying the purpose they do serve is very small. In that case, the effort put into said design document should also be very small.

Our design document is a lot like Jaffe’s. It didn’t take much time, maybe an hour in total to complete. It’s good to have a design document for reference and to record your ideas. Just be sure you know that the game you end up creating and the one in your design document aren’t going to be the same.

-Matt

Hi, I’m Matt Regan. I used to work at Unknown Worlds Entertainment as an environment artist working on Natural Selection 2. If you haven’t played it yet, you should! I loved my time at UWE and have learned some valuable lessons from my time there that I hope to utilize here at InsaneRoot.

InsaneRoot is a small independent game studio based in San Francisco. This blog was created for a few reasons:

1) To show the process of developing a game completely from scratch.

2) Share the trials and tribulations that are gone through in order to complete a game.

3) To learn from and maybe even teach other independent game developers.

4) To capture my insane, incoherent ramblings.

The point of this blog isn’t to be correct on everything or making the perfect game. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. It’s the journey to the answers I’m interested in sharing and experiencing, not necessarily the outcome but I’ll show that too! I have an idea for a videogame. Follow me in my journey to make it into a reality, no matter the outcome, good or bad. Preferably good.

-Matt