Scrabattle
A single player shoot ‘em up focused on dodging and illustrating the difficulties of reading with dyslexia
The Story of Scrabattle
This was a game I made during my sophomore year of college, which was originally meant to make a game using a Hasbro intellectual property. Eventually I came up with the concept of making Scrabble in the form of a vertical scrolling shooter. This way players would have the motivation to dodge specific letters rather than shoot everything they can like in majority of games in this genre. During production those who tested it found the game to be really difficult, which is what inspired the theme of dyslexia. To adjust to these changes I made letters destroy when they hit each other, and forced players to spell words correctly, despite them sometimes being jumbled.
Reception
Players found the game pretty addicting, mostly due to the hard difficulty yet fair game play. Players understood the mechanics fairly quickly and due to the nature of only having one life players would often play multiple sessions at a time.Some of which returning after leaving and others not willing to leave until they correctly spelled a certain amount of words.
Mechanics
The game would randomly generate letters which would fall vertically down the screen. When two letters collide they are both destroyed. While consonants fall straight down vowels fall at a slower pace but horizontally track the player’s position.
To emulate the feeling of having trouble spelling players had to spell the words correctly by shooting the letters in order. Should they misspell the word it would not count and they’d have to respell it all over again.