Enemies & Shadows

Hi, Cadence here. Now that we’ve finished all of the enemies for Pronoun Palace, I wanted to talk a little more at length about the iterative design process behind them. But first, some overdue credit: a number of this game’s wonderful enemy sprites were drawn by RedRachiz, and the Rubber Animal guro header I’ve been using for these newsletters is by Vich Blen (who is otherwise uninvolved with the game). Check them out!

The original Bookworm Adventures mainly falls back on three enemy gimmicks: “locking” tiles so that they become unusable for a few turns, stunning the player, and making enemies vulnerable to word categories. These gimmicks kind of suck; rendering tiles unusable isn’t very interesting because the only counterplay is to not use them, which is already what you do with most tiles by default. Maybe you could plan ahead with locked tiles, but otherwise limiting the player’s options isn’t interesting enough to do with much regularity. Stunning the player is even worse! It opens up no counterplay whatsoever, but that fact is symptomatic of having a traditional status effect system in a spelling game to begin with; sure, the idea of poisoning enemies is fun, but at the end of the day you’re selecting letters on a board, and anything abstracted beyond that is completely tangential.

As for word categories, you would think it’d be a slam dunk, but it’s not! It actually sucks ass. Even ignoring the logistics of making cohesive lists of words, it mostly limits your options in a way that stifles creativity. The first item ever implemented in the game was actually all about word categories; Political Compass was a passive item that would give you different perks for spelling “political” words respective to the corner tiles of your board.

This made it so you could only use one corner tile in a single word, but e.g. spelling “fascist” with the top-right tile (Auth-Right) would give you a damage multiplier, while spelling “prole” with the top-left tile (Auth-Left) would heal you. We scrapped this for being convoluted and also generally unusable, but also, who would want to play a word game where you just keep spelling the same words? A word game isn’t like Balatro where your best hand is usually obvious and winning is about paring down your options, the fun of Scrabble is figuring out what your best options even are. But I digress!

Back on the subject of enemies, Bookworm was one of the first enemies designed for Pronoun Palace. It afflicted tiles with the “burning” status, which dealt self-damage proportionate to tile value when played and became useless coal tiles if left unused. This was intended as a solution to Bookworm Adventure’s tile locking gimmick; instead of directly making tiles unusable, burning tiles were supposed to be played with plastic tiles to negate the self-damage–only cluttering your board with useless tiles if you failed that.

While a cute idea, burning tiles turned out to mostly feel oppressive, annoying, and overwrought. We experimented a lot with this gimmick, but ultimately decided on removing the self-damage and simply having unused burning tiles turn to coal–simply use them or end up with less tiles on the next turn. You could argue some meaningful nuance was lost here, but Bookworm was a first-act enemy, and it wasn’t any fun for an early game encounter to absorb most of your time. We had much more exciting enemy gimmicks to get to in later acts.

Here’s another enemy gimmick that didn’t quite pan out: magnets. How do they work?

This non-copyright infringing placeholder enemy would afflict all of your tiles with magnetism, placing two random poles on either side of each tile. Like poles can’t touch, so magnetic tiles could only be placed in a word if both poles were adjacent to tiles with opposite poles. This was a cool idea, but introduced a significant amount of visual noise and puzzle complexity that was a bit too tedious to last an entire battle. Still, we really liked the idea of tiles that can’t be placed next to one another, it would just need to be more obvious at a glance and with less granularity. Enter gay tiles.

We didn’t set out to make the tiles gay, it just turned out to be the best way to convey the concept of exclusivity. To simplify things further, gay wooden tiles were yuri, and gay plastic tiles were yaoi; yuri and yaoi tiles can’t be placed next to each other in a word, but unafflicted tiles can be used as a buffer between them. Marrying the type of exclusivity to the type of tile helped with legibility while also introducing another strategic element to prioritizing one over the other.

Okay, so enemies can attack you and apply status effects to your tiles. Is that it? This is what you were wondering while reading this newsletter, to be clear. And the answer is that enemies can also do other things! Let’s take a look at Urchin, a pretty simple enemy with a pretty simple gimmick.

Urchin is a psychic orphan who alternates between defending herself and dealing an attack that can be canceled by playing a word at least six letters in length. It’s pretty simple, and the defense turn is just there to give players an extra opportunity to prepare.

As you may have surmised, making an enemy for Pronoun Palace takes a lot more work to draw and animate than to design or code, and for the sake of keeping the game’s scope in check, each act is limited to a pool of 9 unique enemies. But 27 enemies isn’t enough to cover every good idea we’ve ever had, so we fell back on the classic video game solution: recoloring existing enemies!

Enemy champions (or “shadows” as they are actually called in-game) are variants of normal enemies with a different color palette and occasional minor detail changes. These shadows have a 1/3 chance of replacing normal enemies, and of course, also differ in how they play. Every enemy has a shadow–effectively bumping up the total number of unique encounters from 27 to 54. Because enemy shadows have to be unlocked, they’re also allowed to have crazier gimmicks that would otherwise be too zany for new players.

It’s also just a lot of fun to swap the colors of enemies around! My personal goal was to make every enemy variant feel like it could stand in for the main one, which is maybe less fun than going completely wild with ostentatious color schemes, but grounding them also helps with writing up their phonebook entries. I get to ask: is this recolored enemy a different take on the same character, that character but at a different point in their life, or a different but similar looking character completely?

Anyway, remember Urchin? Here’s a quick demonstration of her shadow: Lump.

Lump is actually quite different from Urchin mechanically. Every turn he attacks and chooses a new word category, and spelling a word in that category will double the attack and defense value of that word. Remember Political Compass, and how I said word categories were awful? Well they aren’t completely awful–like, as a single, isolated enemy gimmick, they’re pretty fun! But this is as much as you can do with the gimmick before it wears out its welcome.

Also, recalling Freezer from our past newsletter about wildcards, I wanted to cap this newsletter off by showing you a fun gameplay video of their shadow–Foreign Body.