Fans of Glyph Quest, by Alex Trowers and Leanne Bayley, will be thrilled to hear that the sequel, Super Glyph Quest, is coming out soon. The match-3 role playing puzzler uses elemental glyphs to cast powerful spells and fight monsters.
The development team has been bustling to bring you an enormous amount of new stuff. Just check out this list of improvements:
• New Glyphs! The elements of Primal and Metal join Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Light and Dark.
• New Spells! Over 70 spells to master.
• Character Customization! Create your very own caster.
• More Quests! All new map with a host of new questing locations.
• New Story! Character interactions and conversations.
• More Monsters! All new fiends to save the world from.
• Crafting! Create new gear out of all those pelts and icky stuff.
• Leveling Up! Customize your play with new abilities and power ups.
• Multiple Enemy Encounters! More than one critter can show up in battle at once.
There is no official date for Super Glyph Quest's release, but in the mean time we will congratulate Alex and Leanne on their newest addition to the team: Willow Trowers. Good Job, folks.
One of the finest things about app development is how it opens things up to more than just major studios keen to develop an idea. In increasingly dicey times for those reliant upon others for employment, it's a particular boon to see and some great ideas can come out of tricky times.
One such game is the recently reviewed Glyph Quest, with its developer, industry veteran and one time lead designer at Bullfrog Alex Trowers, letting me know the background to its development. In his own words, "Leanne [Bayley] (the artist), was working in Plymouth, me in Brighton. We decided to move in together and she'd find a new job up this way. Then we found out she was pregnant and had become completely unemployable. Then I lost my job. Instead of finding a new one, we decided we'd try and make a game ourselves. Could we do it before Sproglet arrived? How hard is it for an 8-month pregnant lady to go through [development] crunch [time]?"
More is explained on Leanne's blog but Alex was also kind enough to take some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions.
148Apps: How did the idea for Glyph Quest come about? Alex Trowers (AT):Glyph Quest was originally a side project for us to tinker about at home while Leanne was out of work. I was a big fan of Dungeon Raid's tactile dragging interface (and, more recently, Puzzle & Dragons). Also, I enjoyed the RPG-esque trappings of 10000000. So we kinda threw the rest together. We're both firm believers in emergent and evolutionary gameplay rather than designing something up front and just implementing it, so a lot of the features we added were very much developed on the fly.
148Apps: How different did you find it going from working as part of a team to a much smaller operation? AT: The amount of freedom afforded to you as part of a tiny team is fantastic. We put whatever we wanted in to the game as there were no people further up the chain with the power of veto. That's why you'll find plenty of references to all sorts of things scattered throughout and it's those little touches that i think help us to stand out. In addition we really didn't take ourselves or the genre too seriously. Of course the downside is the lack of resources. Glyph Quest was nowhere near as polished as it could have been come launch and things like our lack of config test or thorough QA were easy to call out. Another thing to consider is that while it's great to have all of that power and control, it does rather mean that the buck stops with you and if it all goes horribly wrong, there's no-one else to blame. It's exciting stuff really.
148Apps: What challenges did you come across? AT: Our main challenge was logistics to do with the pregnancy as well as all of the other things that went wrong in real life. For example, it's not the easiest thing in the world for a heavily pregnant woman to sit at a desk all day. We also had many sleepless nights - either Sproglet would kick Leanne awake or this wisdom tooth (that I'm still waiting to get fixed) would decide that I wouldn't be allowed to sleep. Then there was the roof falling off in the storms and the landlord serving us notice. And we had to have it all done and dusted before Sproglet was born.
148apps: You've written extensively about issues with the iTunes submission process [as well as the development process]. How would you improve it? AT: The iTunes side of things was always pretty simple. Convoluted in places, I guess - particularly when it came to IAPs - but the level of documentation and support available went a long way to mitigating that. The main place where things fell over were with XCode and my own complete lack of knowledge about it. Knowing which menu to find the relevant option to enable or disable some game-breaking feature was an exercise in the arcane. A friend and old Bullfrog buddy of mine postulated that you need this barrier to entry in order to ensure that the platform is secure and I kinda agree with him.
148Apps: What do you plan to do next? Besides enjoy fatherhood! AT: Next? Well, the success of Glyph Quest has taken us completely by surprise so we're coming under increasing pressure to 'fix' issues with the first one or perhaps start looking in to a sequel. The plan was always to make Glyph Quest in order to fund a Kickstarter campaign for something much bigger. I'd still very much like to do that, but another Glyph Quest game makes an awful lot of sense. Then again, Sproglet was born at midday today, so I guess all bets are off and the thing I'd like to do next is sleep.
Huge thanks to Alex for taking the time to answer my questions and congratulations to him and Leanne on the arrival of their baby. Proving to be quite the inspiration given how much they've overcome in recent times, it's the ideal time to try out Glyph Quest, available now on the App Store.
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