More Input Studio
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Devlog
Letters & Liches - Array clawed its way out of one random evening where Heather collaborated with Claude to cure her boredom. Here's the descent, milestone by milestone.
The first build of Word Dungeon was recovered but the date was lost. Early March? Late February? Mysterious...
Back from the dead, but it needed rehab to be any fun. Letters could be all consonants, maps could be un-traversable, once hit there was no recovering — but the possibilities were piling up.
A merchant selling healing potions, New Letters to redraw a bad hand, solid maps you could actually finish, a Dungeon Sovereign boss waiting at depth 3. The fire was lit — and with Claude keeping pace, the scope only grew.
I'm play-testing and forgetting this is my game. Could this actually BE something? The game Word Dungeon already exists, so that's priority one.
Lots of proposals, lots of vetoes, finally a name landed for us! Alliterative, a little gothic, exactly right. Everything since has been built on it.
When the random map generator couldn't satisfy every rule at once — enough distance from the drop to the exit, the right number of cave-ins, no orphaned dead-ends, no repeating patterns, no clustered exits — I hand-built 25 fallback maps, one for every possible starting square. The game always has a valid floor to fall back on. It was a very long but rewarding day.
Wander into a dead end with no way out and the dungeon doesn't just end your run — it swallows you whole. A favorite bit of early cruelty.
A boss guarding all descents from depth three on. Health potions that auto-fire on a hit. The merchant now stocks two extra tiles at a steep price. It's getting more complex here — in a good way.
The dungeon map and the encounter view stopped fighting over screen space and moved into a single panel that swaps based on what you're doing. Fewer things on screen, more room to breathe — especially on a phone. Difficulty modes arrived: Casual for a relaxed spell, Standard for the full climb, and Hard — where a ticking word timer means hesitation costs blood.
A local word list turned out to be the best call — instant validation and the backbone of the Hint feature. I also fine-tuned the monster balance so word length, hit damage, and floor crowding feel like a gradual uncovering rather than a wall.
We ran the whole palette through colorblindness checks — red-green, blue-yellow, the full pass — so the dungeon reads clearly no matter how your eyes handle color.
AFK is good for the brain. The log went silent for a bit in favor of wandering the woods and splashing in the ocean.
Discovery: 75 proper names hiding in the word list. Sorry, "Arthur" — you're not a common noun. Out you go.
Version 46 was a disaster — broken systems top to bottom. So I threw it out and rebuilt from 45. Keeping this one in the log for honesty: not every version ships.
A special visitor — and one of the first to play the game: my musical younger brother, Bronson Cole. Though the visit was really more about hauling furniture than descending a dungeon.
The slash on every hit: satisfying, first try, still there. The ambient score is a looping placeholder holding the atmosphere while a composed track from my brother takes shape. The dungeon is patient.
We packed the whole menagerie into the car and drove 700 miles to an Airbnb in our hometown for a working holiday. Real minigolf together. VR minigolf with family. My mom rode home with us and stayed through mid-May. Life ran full; the game ran slower.
Weeks of arduous building gave the dungeon a witch to walk you through your first descent. She may gift you a valuable incantation, and she'll reward your cheekiness if you spell her name. This character was inspired by a wonderful straight-talking hard-ass named Jean who took in a gaggle of us miscreant teenagers in the late 90s. RIP.
Tons of playtesting showed it was far too easy to get totally weird letter drops — like 6 i's in a 12-tile hand. So I scrapped the old balancing and rebuilt it: each letter gets less likely to repeat as it's drawn, with a guaranteed floor of vowels and consonants. It still gets weird, just not as often!
Emoji placeholders in the 5×5 dungeon map gave way to real creatures — liches, wyrms, and worse — rendered in heavy-handed pixelation, a proud homage to the 80s. Creature and other portraits — art direction in ChatGPT and finishing in Corel PaintShop Pro by Joshua Gates.
I dreamed up a logo and crudely made it in Paint on April 6th. Old friend Inkscape was pivotal in getting it the rest of the way to the official studio version, which landed in the game — proper credits and all — at the end of June. I also dropped in a quick smile-or-frown tap so real players can provide input.
Troubleshooting the sometimes-crackly loop music, I hit a gloriously wrong first result: a fast, melody-free thud — a tiny jackhammer, not remotely dungeon material. A better encoder and a lot of fine-tuning sorted it out.
Full creature portraits queued for the encounter window, a real website where a GoDaddy placeholder used to sit, a demo just visible on the horizon. It's a scary moment to let others into my world, but it's almost time to play.
Turns out the top-scores board had been quietly forgetting everything. It was saving to a system that only worked back when the game ran inside a preview window — out in the real world every save vanished, so the board only ever showed the run you'd just finished. So I moved it to proper browser storage. The board remembers now, which is the entire point of a board.
Sixteen years of numbers work, and this precision geek just had to get some STATS. Naturally, this is the feature I got stupid over. Win, die, or surrender — now the dungeon hands you the full accounting. A depth-by-depth breakdown of every run: your best words, gold and XP earned, the hits you took, and how many hints you leaned on. You always knew how it ended. Now you know how it went.
The game checks a small curated list of common words first — the same list that powers hints, new letters, and incantations (that part's not new). If a word isn't there, it now checks a much larger dictionary built right into the game — faster answers, no web round-trips, no 404s. Both lists keep improving over time as words the game doesn't know (nothing about you) get noted and sent off for review.