Scramble Legends rewards you for spelling longer words with additional time and bonus letters. When you combine multiple bonus letters in a word you unleash an extra powerful attack on your opponent. I’m quite happy with this gameplay as it encourages you to plan ahead and play well. That being said I wanted to reward you for spelling words quickly as well. To that end I created “Overdrive Mode”.

This past weekend Ludum Dare 26 took place. For those of you who don’t know, Ludum Dare is an online 48-hour game making competition. I wasn’t able to participate this time around so instead I took a little time to analyze the results of Ludum Dares 23, 24, and 25. I wanted to understand more about the most successful games so I compiled data on the top 200 games from the past three competitions.

Having decided that you would interact with your opponent by dropping letters on her board the question became how? Different answers to this question resulted in very different gameplay and not all of them being equal. When designing the attack system in Scramble Legends I had three goals in mind:

Scramble Legends has evolved considerably since its inception. From the get go I knew I wanted to make a game that combined the core mechanic of Adlib with competitive, multiplayer gameplay. Along the way, I needed to figure out exactly how that would work in practice.

So far we’ve looked at how the avatars’ style was chosen for Scramble Legends and heard from Kyle McGill about his process to create the final artwork. In this post we’ll look at how Kyle and I proved that the style had enough expressiveness for animation and variability for different characters. Once we were satisfied we were finally able to buckle down and create the nine avatars needed for the game.