Laurie Cheers has eight years of experience in the games industry, but he’s just about to delve into independent development for the first time with a game he describes as “Diablo meets Scribblenauts”. Wordsmith is a puzzle role-playing game in which players collect letters by defeating enemies or destroying objects. Its scale is mind-boggling: you can essentially “craft” weapons, equipment, or even pets to aid you in combat, simply by applying your vocabulary and ability to form anagrams. Hit enter, type “hammer”, and a hammer suddenly appears, giving you the necessary tool to break rocks and coral. If you have the right letters, you can make just about anything; in the demo version I played, you could make a sword, fashion a kilt, summon a horse, and even engineer a plane to scale an otherwise insurmountable mountain.

At what is apparently an early stage of development, Wordsmith is already both impressive and addictive. I found myself going back to the demo a countless number of times both before and after my interview with Laurie, constantly finding new combinations of letters with both practical and cosmetic applications. “I can make twenty objects a day if I spend all day on them,” says Laurie. “The behaviour of the objects is quite simple as well, really. I mean, they do a few things, but they don’t have a lot of animation or anything to worry about, so I charge through words very fast.”

“I made the first prototype back in August, I think, in XNA. I changed it to the Unity engine about six weeks ago, so I’ve been making the current version just for the last six weeks,” Laurie explains. I ask him why he chose to make the switch. “Mostly for immediacy, but also I felt that it wasn’t a good fit for the Xbox because of the keyboard. The XNA distribution process was really lousy as well, and I was having to have people start installing executables, and a lot of people don’t want to do that for a project they haven’t even tried, so Unity works really well in that they have the browser plug-in and then just play it in there.”

The game’s visual style is surprisingly pleasant, albeit not very common. The landscape is fully 3D, but the player and objects are 2D sprites with little to no animation. Laurie tells me that finding the right visual fidelity was one of the biggest challenges he faced in developing the game. “As a one-man project, I don’t have that much time to make everything in the world perfectly modelled and everything, so choosing the right graphical style that would not be totally unappealing, but not too expensive to make, was a big challenge. The world is actually much nicer-looking than the objects in it, and it’s kind of a trade-off, trying to figure out exactly how much time to spend on each aspect.”Will there be some kind of over-encapsulating narrative in the final game? Laurie isn’t sure. “I think it’s going to be kind of implied, I don’t know if I want to have characters talking to you or not,” he tells me. In the current build of the game, there are animals, but no interactive NPCs. “In the first XNA version, there were some characters you could talk to; there was a guy guarding the entrance to a city, and so you had to talk to him to go in, and I’m thinking now that I’ve seen how it works both ways, I’m preferring having a silent protagonist, and a silent world. No one really talking to you, just exploring, and the story being inherent in the world that you see.”

“The idea is that it’s going to be a sort of RPG adventure where you explore this fairly large world, but there are going to be some sections where you’re expected to defend a certain area, because it works out really well that you’re hanging around a particular area and all the things you’ve created are still there, so I’m working on some sections like that at the minute,” Laurie tells me, although he stresses that there will be a strong emphasis on puzzle elements, like the puzzle elements already present in the current demo of Wordsmith. There will be puzzles in each area that players will have to figure out in order to move on with the game.

“As you see in the demo, you have the island that you need to get off, and the mine which you have to figure out how to light, and there’s a mountain where you have to find a way to get up. There will be much more of that, but at the moment there’s hardly any combat, so I’m trying to fit more combat into it as you get on through the game and establish what you need to fight. The pet will become more important, because the pet is a useful way for you to fight things without having to actually get in danger yourself, and weapons will definitely become more important.”

“I envision a sort of community building up with people discussing strategies on how to do things,” he says. There’s already a forum attached to the demo, facilitating discussion and exchange of strategies and tips. Laurie even posted onto the forum, challenging players to get off the island without using letters found in the shipwreck on the shore; the thread’s single response reports a success, from someone drifting away in a tire rather than a boat. “You can actually get new letters by creating certain objects, so for example, if you make a dead body, flies will appear around it, and you can kill the flies to get the letter ‘Y’, which you otherwise can’t get in the demo, and there’s lots of little tricks like that, and I would imagine that’s the kind of stuff that people could really get their teeth into and discuss.”“And I’m envisioning a multiplayer mode. I don’t know exactly what it would be like, but I think it would be really interesting to see two players using the same resources and trying to create the biggest, nastiest things to beat each other with, kind of like the classic wizards’ duel fantasy story, where two wizards are fighting and one turns into something and the other turns into something else to beat it, and so on,” he continues. Even a multiplayer mode a la Minecraft, with multiplayer servers allowing players to fight or work together to build new things, would be an exciting prospect, and at an early time like this, it’s hard to see exactly where the project will go. When will we see more of it?

“I’m looking at a first comprehensive demo probably by the end of November, and then something for people to buy probably in another couple of months after that,” Laurie promises, suggesting that he might mimic the payment system Notch utilised for Minecraft, where interested gamers would buy the game in an early development state and receive free updates for life. “I honestly am trying to figure out what my strategy is, but Notch’s strategy seemed to work well for him, so it’s worth a try. It feels like it’s the kind of game that would work well with that, because there’s a hell of a lot of depth just in having so many words and figuring out how to make new things.”

Laurie’s brought out a new demo since our interview, in which you can fight a dragon; you can find it on his website here, and find updates on his forums here. You can also preorder the first version of the game for only $5 USD. This concludes the second day of Indie Week 2011, during which we’ll be bringing you seven articles over seven days, looking at some of the most exciting new projects in the indie games sector. You can head back to the Indie Week 2011 page to find past and future articles from the event by clicking here, or follow #zcindieweek on Twitter by clicking here. Don’t forget to drop a comment below: what do you think of Laurie’s work on Wordsmith?