Hi everyone! We thought it would be a good idea to share some development insides here.
Today the topic is about how we convert boring text to a fun interactive tool.
Usually text in games is ignored or even frowned upon. That's because games impress and entertain through their interactivity while text is rather a one-sided medium in comparison. We turn this dynamic around to turn text into the main interactive element of the game.
So we place a protagonist - Sarah - inside the text and give her the ability to interact with some of the words. For example, players can take the word “blue”, carry it around and use it on a drawing. This is how you get a blue drawing! Sometimes words are hidden inside other words, so players can break those apart to extract what they need. (drawing = dra + wing)
“Letters” is centered around words and text. But text is still too boring for many players, so how do we defeat this problem? First of all we make each and every word interactive. There always is some feedback when the player kicks a word - audio and visual. If the word is not highlighted and doesn’t have any other words inside of it, it shakes and jitters. This way players understand that their input worked and it was just a wrong word to kick.
Kicking words is fun and something new, but is still not enough to keep players' attention on the text. In this game it’s critical that players actually read the text, so we are encouraging it as much as we can. Words are animated or have special behaviors depending on the narrative of the level. It’s more interesting if words are handwritten before your eyes. People don’t want to read walls of text and even become frustrated if they have too much information at once. This is why we decided that these letters will be written letter by letter while you play and progress in the level. No more than three-four new sentences at once.
Thank you fore reading!
Team Letters