Matthew Inman – the developer behind the hit game “Exploding Kittens” – today unveiled a brand new free game that is a mix between Scrabble and Clash Royale. “Kitty Letter” looks like a super fun new twist on the genre of word games, check out all the details below.
Here’s how developer / artist / creator Matthew Inman, who founded The Oatmeal, describes his innovative new word game he was working on with Matt Wood:
I have a new game for you. It’s free. In this game you delete words. These words turn into armies, advancing forward and attacking your opponent. It’s like Scrabble combined with Clash Royale. It can best be described as ‘words with enemies’. Because you use your word skills to inflate each other.
In addition to the versus mode, which will definitely be popular, there is a nice campaign option. Matthew calls the campaign mode “a giant playable oatmeal cartoon.”
Kitty Letter looks like a lot of fun (smart name too 😂) and is now available for free on iOS and Android. There are also some in-app purchases available.
Check out the new game up close!
If you’re curious about the background story of making Kitty Letter, Matthew shared the whole story:
How Kitty Brief came into being
One practice that has served me well is to create things I actually want to consume. I write comics that I want to read. I make games I want to play. This practice mostly works. Sometimes it’s not like that. And that’s good.
2020 was difficult. I recently moved to an island in the Puget Sound. I moved from the turbulent hustle and bustle of Seattle life to the quiet life of a cold, rainy island. And in the midst of the transition, COVID struck and I cut myself off from everyone and everything, living under gray skies and trapped in an eternal Groundhog day of waking, working and worrying.
Normally this would not be a problem for me. I’m doing well. I thrive on it. I have many stores to make my life feel meaningful. Drawing. Writing. Run. Cycling. Reading. Dog petting.
But I felt like I had completed the ultramarathon equivalent of these activities. Even my dog looks sick to me. I needed something new. And what better way to find something new than to do something old.
So, I started coding. I used to be a developer, and I dusted off my coding skills and built a game. This game had to serve one very specific purpose: I wanted to be able to destroy an opponent with my vocabulary. It’s not that I have a wonderful vocabulary – I would say it’s pretty mediocre. But I like word games. And I also like games like Quake, Clash Royale and Fortnite. So the big idea was to merge the two categories. I wanted to combine high forehead flash puzzles with low forehead fighting games. I wanted to build the battle Royal Boggle. Or ‘words with enemies’. Or Fortnite meets the New York Times crossword puzzle. This game is my attempt to combine Earl Gray Tea with Mountain Dew: Code Red. This is my attempt to put a bow tie on a Juggalo.
After a week of coffee, code and enthusiasm, I created a terrible but functional prototype in PHP, Javascript and HTML. It was a buggy mess. But it worked, and the prototype did its job: it proved to me that the game was fun. So I ended up with the ridiculously talented Matt Wood, a former developer of Valve, who now runs Double Dagger Studio. He took time to work on Little Kitty, Big City, to help me, and we built Kitty Letter together. The last half of the development was done by a handful of amazing developers (Evan Losi, Yu Tak Ting, Matt Stokes and Junho Choi – THANK YOU.)
I sit a lot in this game. It has multiplayer modes so you can fight against friends or strangers, but the real gem is the single player mode. I wrote the equivalent of a dozen oatmeal comics in a story about a disturbed cat owner moving in next door.
I hate free games. I hate games that are built entirely around player retention and mislead people into keeping the app open for as long as possible. I hate coins, currencies, chests and other money printing schemes disguised as fun. For Kitty Letter, I tried to make the game as enjoyable as possible. This means that the chapters are sometimes long and it almost prevents you from playing. There’s a whole chapter built around the slap of a trout to thaw it, and some musical deer moaning sexy for too long. I was trying to build just a short-lived, enjoyable game rather than a medicine game that stretched over months of free garbage mechanics. Fuck retention. Fuck in-game currencies. Embrace the trout, I say. Embrace the groaning deer.
Actually, I’m really proud of this game. It’s still a cart, so please carry me. Meantime, let please. a friendly review in the App Store or Google Play.
Hugs and kisses from Eskimo,
-The oatmeal
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