Filippo Gandini

Lettertopia is a cooperative word game for iPad, designed as the app companion to the physical game set by Osmo. Players use letters to compose words and guide their characters through levels, past enemies called Creatures.

The key mechanic is moving through the Creatures by using words that describe them. To complete Objectives and clear increasingly difficult Levels, players choose among a variety of Characters. Lettertopia combines creativity, language skills and strategic thinking in an educational game.

​Role: Game Designer at Just Funny Games. Client: Osmo. Platform: iPad.

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On Lettertopia, my duties included:

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• Concept and documentation: conceptualized the gameplay and core game loop, wrote all concept documents and the GDD, and conceptualized the game worlds by style.

• Content: created the concepts for characters, traps and enemies, built the list of all the game words, divided characters into tiers and assigned words to each of them.

• Levels and progression: created levels with a simple editor and designed a level progression in difficulty and in the complexity of the words players use.

• UI/UX and collaboration: designed UI wireframes and flows together with the lead, and worked closely with environment artists, animators and programmers.

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Gameplay: 

The game is played on a grid, and players start from points that change from level to level. Enemies are AI-controlled, each with its own behaviour pattern. The game is turn-based: on their turn, players move their characters toward the level's objective zone, collecting Creatures and working together to fulfil the objectives. To move, the active player must form an existing English word in any orthogonal direction. The allowed words are listed in the interface, and each character has its own set of words.

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Game Lore: The characters are the "DreamNauts", heroes who travel through dreams to find, capture and collect the little creatures that escaped from the realm where dreams begin. The World selection hub is their home base, and from there they enter portals to randomly generated Dream Worlds.

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