More Input Studio
More Input Studio
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. Nobody knows when the concept landed. Early March? Late February? Mysterious...
File recovered but needed some rehab to be enjoyed. Letters could be all consonants, maps could be un-traversable, once hit there was no recovering — but opportunities were being dreamed up.
A Merchant selling healing potions, the ability to get New Letters, solid maps with reachable end points, a Dungeon Sovereign boss waiting at depth 3. The fire was lit, and Claude made the pace and scope possible.
While earlier versions were lost, version 11 was where the project started coming into focus. Could this actually be something? Word Dungeon already existed 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 building the dungeon out from there.
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 dungeons, 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 every depth. Health potions that auto-fire the moment you're hit. And a merchant who'll sell you an extra tile — if you can cover it.
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 were also introduced: 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 was the best approach, so it was built to support first-check validation and the Hint feature. Monster difficulty balance was also fine-tuned so word length, hit damage, and population per floor felt 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.
Sometimes the most important dev tool is stepping away from the keyboard. The log went quiet for a bit. It was worth it.
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. The decision was made to throw it out and rebuild from 45. Keeping this one in the log for honesty: not every version ships.
The slash on every hit: satisfying, first try, still there. The ambient score is a generated loop holding the atmosphere in place while a composed track from Bronson Cole takes shape. The dungeon is patient.
One special visitor, and one of the first to try L&L — Array: my musical younger brother, Bronson Cole. The visit was centered on relocating furniture rather than traveling a dungeon, however.
We packed the dog, the cat, work computers, and three VR headsets 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.
An arduous build over many weeks resulted in a beloved witch to walk you through your first descent. She may gift you a valuable incantation and will 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. The old balancing and guaranteed minimum rates were scrapped and completely reimagined with decay rates and adjusted guarantees of minimum vowel and consonant counts. It still gets weird, just not as often!
Emoji placeholders in the 5x5 dungeon map gave way to pixelated versions (homage to the 80s) of the creatures — liches, wyrms, and worse. Creature and other portraits — art direction via ChatGPT and finishing in Corel PaintShop Pro by Joshua Gates.
A logo had been dreamed up and crudely made by me in Paint on April 6th. Old friend Inkscape got it the rest of the way to the official studio version, which made its way into the game along with proper credits in early July.
Troubleshooting the sometimes crackly generated loop music led to a hilarious first result. A fast repeating thud with no melody was not fitting for the dungeon, even as a fallback option. Fixed with a better encoder and a lot of fine-tuning.
Full creature portraits queued up for inclusion in the encounter window, a seamless looping score functioning while the real stuff is being created, and a demo taking shape. It's almost time to play.