It's always tempting to ask those who create games where their ideas come from, but video games are like all creative endeavors: the idea is rarely as important as someone's ability to execute on that idea. A friend told developer Zach Gage about a game that was like "Tetris and Boggle," and he immediately had an idea of how that game would look and play. When he saw the described game being played in front of him, he realized his ideas were very different, and he went to work creating his own game, hoping to release the smaller-scale project quickly. After all, he was in the middle of four other titles.

There was, on the other hand, one small problem. Gage hated word games.

"Making games in a genre that I don't enjoy is a lot of work, but its also an incredible amount of fun. I'm a big proponent of 'Outsider Art' and I think the same tenets apply to game design," Gage told Ars. "Doing something I don't understand keeps me focused because I'm learning so much and everything is so exciting. It also affords me the possibility of stumbling on something new that nobody's ever tried before."

Gage created a prototype for SpellTower, and his friends became hooked on the concept. This was fascinating to him, and he began to work on the project in a unique way. He had the skeleton of a really good game already, now he just had to figure out why it was good, and to get a feel for a genre of games that he was never interested in.

"Trying to unravel their addiction opened up my eyes to the whole genre of word games," Gage said. "I've never been into word games at all, but I decided if I was going to make one, I had better play a few, so I checked out Wurdle and Bookworm, and asked my friends for game recommendations."

He began playing word games himself, learning what people liked about them, and what he felt had to change. He experimented with new modes in SpellTower, and continued to play-test the game with his friends. The challenge was making sure the people who were playing the game continued to have fun, and he also needed to enjoy the game. Why not create something that would appeal to people who historically didn't enjoy word games?

Most spelling games simply reward you for making words, giving you a higher score for longer words. SpellTower took those concepts and added much more of a "game" around them. "It's not just about knowing words, it's about knowing when and where to use words," Gage explained. "The difficulty also gives the game a weight that I don't think games like Bookworm have. Because it has constant micro goals—such as don't let this column touch the top, bring down this column so I can make words later, or clear out some blank tile—players' moves always have importance to them."

I've been playing SpellTower myself for the past few days, and I've yet to try to spell a word the game didn't know, and this surprised me due to the game's short development cycle and Gage's inexperience in creating word games. So I had to ask, how do you get all those words into an indie game?

Gage said the problem was more complex than even he anticipated. "Initially I was generously given the dictionary to Wurdle, an iOS game from SemiSecret, but that proved to not be enough for some of my fans, so I reached out to the indie game developer community again and got some more open source wordlists which I scoured and combined to end up with the current dictionary," he said. He also looked at Scrabble wordlists, but those are hard to find online, or in forms that he could license for use in the game. "I think the current dictionary that I have in SpellTower is very complete though, and haven't received any complaints yet, so hopefully it's good enough and, if not, the beauty of app updates is I can always fix it up," Gage said.

Even without being featured by Apple, sales have been strong and, maybe more importantly to Gage, people seem to have connected with the game in a rare way. "I've made a number of critically acclaimed games, but none of them have ever gotten this strong a reception, or hooked groups of people so quickly. Most of my friends ended up playing it with their families over Thanksgiving, and that's something I never would have expected," he told Ars.

The game has recently gone universal, allowing for play on the iPhone as well as the iPad, although that has provided some interesting design challenges. He also has other plans for content for the game, and is looking forward to continuing development. And, of course, he's hoping that a new set of features and universal support is going to be enough for Apple to feature the game, an important step for iOS titles to reach the next level of sales.

We're keeping our fingers crossed, and we're hoping Gage hates something else in the near future if games this good are the result.