Blogs - bentvector

Word Portal is my third game release as an indie developer and Sole Proprietor of Bent Vector Studios. The first game, Plummet (Windows Phone only) was created in about 1 day as part of a Nokia/Microsoft hackathon in Toronto. The second game, Lost Keys was a major labour of love. You can get full details on how Lost Keys came to be on my personal blog here. Both of these games were written using C# and XNA.

After completing Lost Keys, I decided a new engine was required and chose to go with Unity3D. For those who've used UDK or Unity, you know that the initial learning curve is fairly steep and figuring out the "best" way to do many things is really hard. I therefore decided to create a small game, make it 3D and use Unity to make it.

I've always enjoyed non-computer word games like Scrabble, crosswords, etc. I'm also an avid reader, averaging nearly a book a week these days. As my Lost Keys blog will tell you, I've also been a huge computer gamer and wanna-be indie game developer. However, I've found playing computer games online to be a frustrating experience. When I was younger, I enjoyed CounterStrike online, Need For Speed online and a handful of other games online - at least until the hackers/cheaters ruined the experience. These days, I simply don't have the time to dedicate to mastering online games to a level required to be competitive. I love StarCraft, but never compete online because there's just no point given that I only play a few hours a week.

I really enjoy Microsoft's Wordament (TM) game, but find it exceedingly frustrating that I rarely break the top 20% (despite an IQ of 185) and rarely find more than 1/2 the words the "top" players find. I've also tried some of the turn-based games but found the dependency on unreliable players frustrating - at one point I had 4 different games of Book Worm going and waited nearly a week for a response before un-installing the damn game.

So I decided that if I was going to make a small word game as my first Unity-based title it needed to properly handle the online side of things for casual players like me! It seems like current online word games take one of two tactics:
1. Turn-based, wait forever for the other player to make a move, OR
2. Time-limited, play the game as fast as you can, fast fingers are rewarded over large brains.

Word Portal proposes a third option, similar to the scoring "ladders" of many popular early pseudo-online games:
- all players play the same level in their own time and space
- take as long as you want to play a level
- replay a level as often as you want to improve your score
- scores are permanently stored and ranked in online leaderboards
- you don't need to be online when you play; your profile will synchronize with the server next time you connect

In addition to the online game design choice, I also decided to take a slightly different tactic with respect to the game interface. Word games are typically 2D games with bright colours, no lighting, maybe some pretty backgrounds and a few special effects. Since I was moving to Unity for the 3D capabilities, I definitely wanted to created a 3D game. I therefore decided to make Word Portal fully 3D with each level a beautifully hand-crafted and rendered environment with high resolution models, textures, particle effects, music and sounds.

I hope you enjoy playing Word Portal as much as I have enjoyed creating it!

- Rob