A Crossword Caper

Updated on

Timeline: 2006 to 2008

Platform: PC Windows

The Game: A Crossword Caper mixes elements from classic board crosswords games (like Scrabble®™ and Upwords®™) with features of puzzles. Help Eugene and his friends to fix the Word Machine before the Science Fair begins! Fun for the family! There are 35 different stages, five characters to choose from (Kevin, Jimi, Rocky, Nina and Eugene) and more than 100.000 words.

My Contributions

The very first game I fully completed and launched to market, I was also one of the main developers and lead designer. This is one of the projects that most tested my abilities as software developer ever, because the team was small and I had to do a bit of everything.

Like Incorporated, this project also received a sponsorship from the Brazilian Department of Culture to build playable prototypes, but we used the small amount of money (around USD 15k) to produce a full game out of it.

Design & UXProduct & ProductionEngineering
  • Game design of all Content & Systems;
  • Core crossword-based system that formed "bridges" for characters to walk over;
  • Level design of 35 stages with crossword mechanics;
  • Narrative design, the story of how a science fair goes very wrong!
  • Characters and their special, unique Word powers;
  • Boss fights with a different, word-guessing design (not crosswords)
  • UI art & UX design.
  • Led the project with a team of 8 people;
  • People management;
  • Project & tasks management;
  • Product plan and business plan for sponsorships;
  • Product pitches and business development with publishers;
  • Management of outsourced work.
The game and its tools were developed in C# (.Net) with the Irrlicht game engine.
  • UI component library;
  • Animation system;
  • Level editor;
  • Particles tooling, porting an OGRE particle editor to C#;
  • VFX in the game, mixing particles and basic HLSL shaders;
  • 3DS MAX scripts to export assets;
  • Management of the VCS system (Alienbrain)

Media