Letters & Legends - inspiring the game

Letters & Legends is the upcoming word game from Bow & Arrow Games. You’ll create words from a grid of letters to fight more than 120 monsters in over 100 challenging levels – but where did the initial idea come from?

Back in the day when everything was in black and white, my whole family got hooked on a game called Bookworm Adventures, developed by PopCap before they got bought by EA and forced to remake Plants vs Zombies over and over again. At heart, it was a Boggle-style word game, but incredibly well realised and polished. Sadly, you can’t buy Bookworm Adventures or its sequel anywhere anymore, although there have been other games to occasionally fill the void – take a look at Words For Evil, for example.

Fast forward a few years, and I’d been playing a fair chunk of 10000000, which if you haven’t seen it is an excellent match 3 game with an RPG / rogue-lite twist. I had in my head a version of 10000000 but with words instead of gems: you’d have a little guy walking along the top of the screen, and he’d hit baddies with his sword based on words you built.

As is the way with all ideas, a lot changed in the design phase. A guy walking along fighting enemies in real time is suitably frantic if you’re flipping coloured gems, but if you then have to make actual words the timing of the whole affair gets very difficult – that, or the enemies do a lot of hanging about. Far better to have static enemies, and the option for a round timer.

And suddenly I had a game that was a bit like Bookworm Adventures, but I wanted to give it a twist. In Bookworm, the enemies have special attacks that are unrelated to the letters on the grid, which works very well if you have great animators working on every attack. Instead, I let my enemies make words of their own – technically a more complicated solution both to code and to balance, but there would be less focus on the movement of the enemies and more on the letters they chose.

There are a lot of simple puzzle games on app stores everywhere, particularly games where you have 5 or 6 letters and you need to find words, so I wanted to differentiate my game from those. I’m a big fan of games like Puzzle Quest, where the idea of you just playing a puzzle game is somewhat obfuscated by a story and role-playing elements. That led me to developing 3 separate characters to play, each with their own skills and that could be levelled up throughout the game, and then special items and potions to give the sense that this wasn’t just some random puzzler.

And that’s where Letters & Legends came from. Feel free to ask questions or to comment on your own development experiences here! Letters & Legends goes live on PC and Android on 26 April 2024. You will be able to buy it here on Itch.io, on Steam, on Google Play, and on the Epic Games Store just as soon they let the game out of review.