Review: SpellTower
Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 7:57PM By Jack Glenn and Jacob Williams
Get ready to bring out the dictionary.
SpellTower, the latest brainchild of Zach Gage, brings the power of spelling to your fingertips, allowing you to swipe across the board between letters to spell words. The tiles form, and then you press each letter to add it to the word. Once your word is spelled, press the last letter to count it. Points pile up, but so do letters. Certain tiles (letters) have special “powers”. Blue tiles wipe entire rows when used. Black tiles have no letter and can only be removed by using a letter next to the tile.
"Even my Mom, who hasn't played a videogame since Tetris, is addicted to SpellTower." - Zach Gage
Some tiles have a number in the corner. The number indicates the minimum number of letters you can use if you want that letter in the word. The minimum automatically is 3, so don’t go trying “I” or “A” or “IT”. You also can never use the same word twice in the same game.
A Word Game that Does Your iPad Justice.
With its huge 10x15 tile grid, SpellTower has room for some serious word strategy.
Find and swipe words in 4 challenging modes. Finding words clears them from the screen, dropping any tiles above.
Make long words or use bonus tiles to clear extra letters from the screen!
Words + Strategy = Awesome
Pick your words wisely!
As you work, more tiles rise from the bottom of the screen, and it'll take all of your lexicological wits and tactical know-how to keep them down. If any of the letters make it to the top row, it's game over.
Four Amazing Modes
Tower Mode
No pressure here. Try and get the highest score possible out of 150 letters, eliminating small words to set up 7- and 8-letter blockbusters!
Puzzle Mode
Every word you make adds a new row of letters! Strategic word finding at its best.
Extreme Puzzle Mode
Like Puzzle mode, but with the minimum word length cranked up. Experts only!
Rush Mode
Rows of letters build up over time. Find words as fast as you can, but be careful you don't back yourself into a corner!
Game Center Integration
Show off how smart you are with online leaderboards for each mode and best word!
The game has 5 sections. The first, Tutorial, is mandatory the first time you play the game. It teaches you the basics, as well as some of the parts that make the game difficult. After that, Tower Mode is unlocked. Tower Mode is simple and somewhat inflexible, allowing you to use only 150 letters to get as many points as you can. After getting a certain amount of points there, Puzzle, Ex Puzzle, and Rush Modes are unlocked. Puzzle Mode and Ex Puzzle Mode are different only in difficulty level; Ex Puzzle Mode is harder. In both, every time you form a word, a new row is added. Get as many points as you can before a row reaches the top, then game over. Rush Mode is a faster-paced version of these two. Every once and a while (every 15-16 seconds) a new row is added.
This game isn’t perfect. There isn’t too much to do once you’ve tried the four main modes. You can keep playing in all four modes to go for a high score, but at some point you’ll get a seemingly unbeatable score, and then you might find yourself bored with the game. Sometimes, it seems impossible too. There are situations where no matter how hard you work to get that row down as low as possible, it just won’t go down.
However, SpellTower is easy to learn, play, and enjoy. You don’t really have to be Winston Churchill do to well in this game. In fact, some of the words you use won’t seem like words until you use them. For example, words like “MIL” and “SHEW” were new to my vocabulary. Rush Mode can get very exciting; you really are racing the clock to find a word, or even two.
With a nice price of $1.99, fun concept, and high replay value, SpellTower is obviously one of the App Store's stand-out games.
Score: 8/10
Devolping SpellTower was a new and fascinating experience for creator, Zach Gage. He elaborated on this new endeavor for us:
Lately I’ve been experimenting with how I develop my games. When the AppStore first showed up and everyone was new to it, there was a bit of a rush to get things onto the store as fast as possible. Everyone briefly flirted with the model of releasing something early, and then if it proved popular, releasing a lot of updates to it to get it even to 1.0 functionality. In short, there were a lot of beta apps. In a lot of ways, this was awful for the consumer, but one thing that came out of it that was really exciting, was that if you were following particular app developers, it was like peering into their sketchbooks. Now that I get to go to conferences and meet other indies and see what they’re working on and then see how long it takes anything at all to come out, I’m starting to really appreciate the value of that early time in the app store.
"All in all it was a pretty crazy experience."
Lately it feels like I have more and more work stockpiling under me and not getting released because to put something in the AppStore requires such a huge amount of polish these days. That’s been really frustrating, so I’m trying two new strategies to deal with that. One is working with other people. In a number of my projects I’m working with other coders, game designers, musicians, and artists. This means I can work on (and polish) upwards of 4 games at a time.
The other strategy is just to figure out how to make games faster, and that’s what I did with SpellTower.
1. Quick Development Time
I developed SpellTower in 13 days, two and a half of which included attending a conference and not working super hard, and two were days I had to teach my class at Parsons. Although these 13 days didn’t include the very first prototype (a simplified version of rush mode with no difficulty ramp), they did include creating all the sounds, all the graphics, and the entire design of the game, as well as coming up with all 4 modes, writing the tutorial, inventing mechanics to allow for a difficulty ramp, and doing and reacting to extensive (for the timeframe) play testing.
All in all it was a pretty crazy experience. Even though I never worked more than 10 hours on the game straight, SpellTower was always on my brain, and because of that I didn’t get to spend very much time al all with my friends, girlfriend, or relations during those 13 days (outside of playtesting).
In retrospect though, it wasn’t nearly as hard as I would have expected it to be on the outset. Being really excited about both the project and the short timeframe experiment kept me focused, and I benefitted a lot from having playtesters around me who were excited about every new build.
There was one other thing that really helped keep me focused though, and that was :
2. New Genre for me
When I first started working on apps a few years back I made something called synthPond. It was a musical instrument for visual people. I made it because I wanted to be able to compose music but I’m highly visually oriented and don’t understand notation. It was a really exciting piece of software to develop because I didn’t know how to make a musical instrument and I knew very little music theory. This turned what would normally be a droll development process (why it’s taken me so long to develop it for the iPad), into a really exciting one, filled with learning.
The next game I made was Unify, which was a block dropping puzzle game… Except I hated block dropping puzzle games at the time. I didn’t know how to make games at all, and I *really* didn’t know how to make puzzle games. I had to reach out to friends who loved playing block drop puzzle games for help, asking them to show me their favorite titles, and explain why they were good. Next I had to get good at those games myself. Figuring out how to tune the difficulty in Unify was all about learning what makes puzzle games work, both in the games, and in the players, and I came out the other side loving the genre. I had a new game, and a new appreciation.
After that I made a few games in genres that I like: Action, music, strategy, etc.. (these games are not all out yet) and while this was fun, the development process was slower… and so for SpellTower, I decided to go back to my old style of working, and make something that I’d never done before, something that I didn’t enjoy playing: Word Games.
And what a learning experience it was. Now I have to admit I’ve only spent a few days with this stuff still, and so none of this should be taken as strictly factual, these are just some observations that I used to guide my way through SpellTower development.
Play in word games is typically very different than play in any other genre. Word Game players are on the whole, vastly more proficient at their particular skill set than any other players I’ve ever seen.
For example, most halo players do not play on legendary difficulty, but most scrabble players know all the 2 letter words. Essentially, having a huge vocabulary and facility with anagrams isn’t just a nice thing to have when you play word games, it’s a borderline requirement. Fortunately, words are very useful in all walks of life, so it’s a skill that is honed outside of the games where it’s needed.
Still though, word-skill takes a lot of work and time to master, and because of that, Word Game players don’t generally want to ‘play’ word games in the traditional sense. They mostly just want to demonstrate their skills… or at least this is what you would be led to believe by most other word games out there. Boggle, Wurdle, Bookworm, WordSearches, Crosswords, taboo, etc, all of these games are about demonstrating a large vocabulary, and the player with the best wins. There’s not really a lot of what I would term as gameplay in these games. More so they are just a few rules around the idea of vocabulary demonstration. And this seems to work. Talking to a lot of Bookworm players I learned that essentially people will play a single game of Bookworm for weeks, slowly farming out bonus tiles to create the largest word possible. Crossword puzzles are notable here because they provide substantial gameplay that consists entirely of what you know. Although there is generally a ‘hint’ and a ‘puzzle’ in New York Times crosswords, the dominant factor on if you can do a specific puzzle or not is usually the day it was published, mondays being the easiest and sundays being the harvests. And if you can’t do it, you simply can’t do it.
Word Game players don’t like to be cornered or pressured by forces aside the limits of their own knowledge. This is the opposite of most other types of games (except casual games).
Scrabble is of course the exception to this rule, and potentially why it’s so popular. It’s one of the few word games that manages to pull in some outside force to exert control over your word making abilities. The claim that Scrabble makes to us as players, is that if we are strategic with our words, we can win over someone with a better vocabulary. On the other hand, if we have an incredible vocabulary, we can win over something who is only passably strategic. Scrabble pits these two forces against eachother, and that makes it compelling. Of course, the downside of scrabble is that you don’t need a great vocabulary -only a knowledge of all the two letter words- to make the game hell for the other player.
So that leads me back to SpellTower. I first developed it as a game with a timer, what is now essentially Rush Mode. It didn’t take long to discover that this didn’t jive with a lot of word gamers out there. Many were immediately uncomfortable with the idea of things piling up. Having to act fast while they were still learning the system was scary and frustrating.
Essentially I was trying to create a system with two difficulty vectors (like scrabble). SpellTower’s vectors were Vocabulary, and Speed. But speed was making people uncomfortable
I immediately set out towards making a newer slower mode. One whose second vector would be strategy instead of speed. This is what turned into Puzzle Mode. In SpellTower’s puzzle mode new rows of letters are only added each time you make a word, so as long as you can keep making large words, you won’t lose.
Initially I thought this would provide suitable difficulty, but I quickly learned that my housemate could play for literally 3 hours without losing. Since I was adding a row every time a word was created, there was no finer granularity there to ramp up the difficulty with.
I also couldn’t just increase the minimum word length, as 3 letter words are basically required for manipulating the board so that longer words are possible. I had to come up with a way of increasing difficulty that was built into the system.
My solution was tile based length requirements.
For example, a ‘P’ with a ‘5’ in the corner, could only be able to be used in a word at least 5 letters long. What this meant was that I could slowly introduce these tiles over the course of the game, starting with 4’s and moving all the way to 6’s. This gave me the two difficulty vectors I was looking for.
It made the game appealing to any player demographic (hopefully):
An novice player will bow out of the game early, since they cannot find enough 5 letter words to keep the tower from piling up. They will only encounter the strategy vector in passing, probably when some letters conveniently drop together. The strategic elements will be a fun experience, and they will enjoy demonstrating their vocabulary to the game.
A reasonable player will get to the required letter tiles and the 4s and 5s will eventually block up her board. She will have to start to think about strategy when the 4s show up, and when she loses, it will be because she backed herself into a corner, without pressure from the game.
An expert player will make it all the way to the 6s before getting blocked off. On successive playthroughs, an expert will improve her strategy - since vocabulary is already maxed out - and will become engrossed with the more intense strategic vector of SpellTower (hopefully), potentially having a new experience (many word game players do not play non casual video games). Later on, the expert player will move to Extreme Puzzle Mode (where the 6s are prevalent and strategy is paramount), or Rush Mode (with their newfound confidence).
All in all, it was a 13 days I would do again, and I don’t think I would have attempted to make a word game with such a focus on strategy if I had known what I was doing when I started. Now I’m not saying thats true for everyone, but for me, it was only by virtue of being an outsider that I stumbled upon that possibility.
I have yet to see how SpellTower does in the AppStore, but so far people seem to like what it’s offering, and I’m glad I could get it out there. I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I enjoyed making it.
