Gibberish is a word game I pitched back when I was working at Halfbrick. Pitched at the height of Words with Friends, it's an Asynchronous game where you take turns with someone else to make the best word!
FORMING IDEAS
The idea initially came from a Game Design practical prototype test the designers did together - I wanted to make a word game, and came up with this stacking idea. You have a 4x4 grid of cards, each with a letter on them worth points, which you can then make the best word you can. Each space is 7 layers deep, so once you've used a letter, the board changes to include the next one down!
Compared to Scrabble, there are a couple unique features - cards with QU, ING, ED, etc, as well as Double Word cards and Double Letter cards, which you can put between two letters and will double those points.
While not deeply looked into, I also felt this could be a game which would work in a lot of different languages. With no rules on cards needing to be next to each other, and a whole 16 options to choose from, languages like Spanish, German and more shouldn’t be too much of an issue to build into the product, and very few word games support anything other than English.
THE PITCH
The above photos were taken on my Christmas break, showing it to some friends who were also keen on the idea. I then used that as my pitch deck for our Halfbrick Game Jam at the start of the year. Dale Freda was the programmer for the game during the Game Jam. He was unfortunately quite sick for the first several days. Feeling bad about not being able to make the game, he worked super hard the next day, to the point that he got locked into the office overnight.
CONTINUED DEVELOPMENT
The game would then go into the "Month long" Game Jam we did, again with a small team. One of the things I really liked about this idea is the visuals. Games like Words with Friends don't have many cool ways to change up the board and tiles, but we have cards! We can use different fonts, different backings, even cool brands, like Game Of Thrones! I knew finding an artist for the game would be hard, as they felt that a word game wouldn’t be very fun to work on, so I made the effort.
After the Game Jam the game was reasonably playable, but unfortunately didn’t go any further. the backend requirements for having this work, and then also having the studio play it, just made it not a possibility.
reviVAL
8 years after leaving Halfbrick, imagine my surprise when the game got releases, for real! Part of the Halfbrick+ program, the studio was finding older projects to release as prototypes, and Gibberish was a simple enough idea to be thought as a revival.
For this released version, they did a lot of work to it. Rebuilt it from the ground up in unity, simplified some of the rules, and a complete makeover with some great feel-good juiciness, and it has online & local multiplayer!
While I don't work there any more, I'm glad it's out. It's definitely something I've pitched several similar, but different, ideas for over the past few years.
You can download the game on iPhone and Android.
PROTOTYPE IMAGES
FINAL IMAGES
