Hello! I'm Lee Williams and I'm one half of the core development team for Cryptmaster. Paul Hart did all the coding and art and I did the writing and voice. We collaborated on the general design. I think I had the easier job!
Cryptmaster is a dungeon-crawling, word-based puzzle RPG. It has been variously described as "Wordle in a crypt", "Mavis Beacon teaches necromancy" and "Scrabble meets Inscryption"! The idea didn't really come to us all at once, it grew very gradually out of a host of other ideas, changing all the time as we developed it.
We actually started to make a game in which you commanded a pirate ship by shooting things with your pistol. Then we decided you'd be able to shoot words out of people's sentences to change their meaning. Then we ditched the gun and came up with a system that allowed you to steal and replace words to fit the story. We were struggling to stick with the pirate theme by this time, so we switched to fantasy - a game about mages using words to affect their environment and fight enemies. Then, finally, we realised that a dungeon crawler was the best match, added a snarky narrator, and the game took shape from there.
The development was a lot of fun! It's a goofy game and we goofed around a lot making it. We've both worked for studios of various sizes and we relished the opportunity to get stuck into something that was entirely ours. We were also very lucky to get picked up by Akupara Games fairly early on and they really just supported us unconditionally in making the best game we could.
As far as I know, we chose Unity because that's what Paul is most familiar with and he knew it could do everything we wanted.
I guess balancing was the trickiest thing in Cryptmaster, and some of the challenges there were unique to the game. For example, we went to and fro a lot on how many skill words to include for the players to guess. Some players would struggle to get past the first few, even by the game's end, and some players (especially streamers who have the assistance of chat!) would blow through all the words very quickly. In the end, we decided it was better to have too many words and accept that many players would finish the game without learning all of them, than to have too few words and frustrate players who collected them all long before the game was over.
Manage your scope. Figure out early on what you can and can't realistically do. Write it down and stick to it. It's much better to make a small game that you can expand on next time than to leave a game unfinished.
Only that we're tremendously grateful to everyone who has bought and played the game. We put a lot of passion into making it and it is so satisfying to see it connect with people. We have a big free update coming out soon as a thank you!
-Lee
❤️
