"When you're young and you want to be an artist, you look at things and you go, 'These people don't know anything! I'm right, the things I love are great, and all these other things are crap'"
For instance, Really Bad Chess scales its difficulty up and down not by changing the quality of the AI opponent, but by changing the pieces each team begins the game with. He made another word game called Typeshift, created two Solitaire apps in Sage Solitaire and Flipflop Solitaire, and offered a new take on chess with Really Bad Chess, all of which offer immediately clear new approaches to the source material. Since that time, Gage has had a successful string of games that offered similarly novel approaches to well-worn genres. "I think I got addicted to that process of working in this field that had a bunch of unknown constraints I would have to discover and work with," Gage said of the process. He added a few more strategic mechanics to round out the gameplay and make it more appealing to his fellow non-word game fans. He played a number of word games himself to figure out what the appeal is. He talked to word game fans about which titles they liked and why.
Having been convinced that SpellTower was onto something, Gage began to polish it for release. For me, that was like, 'Who cares.' But for someone who likes word games it was, 'Oh my god! Here's this weird way I can interact with words, and that's enough for me to get really excited!'" And they saw that immediately, because that was their jam. It was just, 'What's the word I can find? Ok, I'll find it.' But for people who love word games, there's a depth to the strategy and decision-making that exists in finding words, choosing what you're going to spell, rearranging letters to allow for different kinds of things in the future. "SpellTower to me didn't have those things. Gage didn't think much of SpellTower at first Gage said at the time that he preferred games like Advance Wars, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Halo 3, "deeply mechanical, games with a lot of moving components you had to think about all the time to be able to make the best move." It was shocking to me my friends were playing it and telling me how good it was." But all my friends who loved word games said, 'Oh my god, this is amazing, you have to work on it.' And I thought it was really kind of a failure when I was working on it. "When I played it, I just found words and the blocks fell down and I thought, 'Eh, this is kind of boring,'" Gage told this week, adding, "I was really not somebody who enjoyed word games at all. When Zach Gage first put together a prototype for his 2011 word game SpellTower, he didn't much care for it.
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