Shaun Inman

I never thought I'd make a word game. I certainly never thought I'd make a sequel to a word game. But here we are! Cross Words is part of @play.date Season Three and out this week, today even: play.date/games/cross-...

Anyway, that was an unexpected wordy trip down memory lane. If you made it this far I hope you'll check it out: play.date/games/cross-...

I never thought I'd make a word game. I certainly never thought I'd make a sequel to a word game. But here we are! Cross Words is part of @play.date Season Three and out this week, today even: play.date/games/cross-...

I used classic text-to-speech to generate a faux-GPS that comments dryly on specific in-game events (but always in terms of traffic or travel). Then the polish continued off and on for the next year or so. I had missed the window for Season Two but submitted for to Season Three and got in!

I never thought I'd make a word game. I certainly never thought I'd make a sequel to a word game. But here we are! Cross Words is part of @play.date Season Three and out this week, today even: play.date/games/cross-...

Fun audio hack: I had trouble locking down the loop points for the 114 BPM background tracks so I ended up exporting it at 120 then played them back at 95% speed. And because the tracks already lean lo-fi, I used an LFO to add a bit of that slow tape warble. Really happy with how it turned out.

I never thought I'd make a word game. I certainly never thought I'd make a sequel to a word game. But here we are! Cross Words is part of @play.date Season Three and out this week, today even: play.date/games/cross-...

(I went this manual route because every "free 5-letter word list for games!" is either just a copy of the original, copyrighted Wordle word list, an unfiltered copy of Knuth's sgb-words.txt from the 1990s complete with racist and vulgar terms, or choked with names and proper nouns.)

I never thought I'd make a word game. I certainly never thought I'd make a sequel to a word game. But here we are! Cross Words is part of @play.date Season Three and out this week, today even: play.date/games/cross-...

Two weeks after the initial prototype I began reintroducing the car aesthetic that would tie it to its prequel, Word Trip, before putting it down for the next six months.

I never thought I'd make a word game. I certainly never thought I'd make a sequel to a word game. But here we are! Cross Words is part of @play.date Season Three and out this week, today even: play.date/games/cross-...

Bump up the stroke width, add random offsets to the points along the line, and let the crank control how much of the line is drawn.

I never thought I'd make a word game. I certainly never thought I'd make a sequel to a word game. But here we are! Cross Words is part of @play.date Season Three and out this week, today even: play.date/games/cross-...

A week later I was bemoaning the fact that by the end of development (wishful thinking), every game is just an app with a game buried somewhere inside it.

I never thought I'd make a word game. I certainly never thought I'd make a sequel to a word game. But here we are! Cross Words is part of @play.date Season Three and out this week, today even: play.date/games/cross-...

...before quickly finding its own visual language over the next few days.

I never thought I'd make a word game. I certainly never thought I'd make a sequel to a word game. But here we are! Cross Words is part of @play.date Season Three and out this week, today even: play.date/games/cross-...

Looking through my Slack messages, it turns out we're releasing it almost exactly two years to the day from the first prototype (off by one, typical)

So our youngest got really into ratcheteer.com. Like really into it. She was routing the Snowcean and learning and writing her name in Astral. I swear she only chirped at us for two days after the first time she played.

But it was a little hard for her. Which fair, it is modeled after Game Boy Color games. So I made her a special build where she could play as a Chirpmunk that couldn't be hurt. And then she wanted eeeveryone to be a Chirpmunk. The humans. The Astrals. And she wanted to be able to play it on Switch.