Gary Penn, Denki

Quarrel is a word game by developer Denki that Ready Up has been waiting some years to see come to fruition. We got our hands on an early version of the game a few years back and have been champing at the bit for the launch ever since. With a change of both platform and publisher, Quarrel is finally about to make its way to iOS and it’s a cracker. There are precious few word games out there of the quality and compulsiveness of Quarrel. Also I’m sick of getting beat at Words with Friends by the other Ready Up staff so it’s time for something new to show off my vocabulary and strategise with.

I caught up with the silver-tongued word-smith that is Denki’s Internal Development Manager and former famed  Zzap!64 Editor, Gary Penn, to talk about how Quarrel has evolved and to give you some tips. Actually don’t read those. I need those to beat you.


I’ve been lucky enough to play a build of Quarrel a while back and although it’s straightforward once you start playing it’s a bit more complicated to describe. Tell us a bit about it.

Quarrel’s about playing with words – in a silly, impossible way rather than some awfully clever witty way or some well-meaning but stuffy edutainment way. You use words as weapons to win wars; the words you make are used by your troops as weapons to fight to take over territories, dominate islands and rule the world.

Quarrel was born from a mash-up of Dice Wars and this really popular word game we did for Sky called Word Crunch. The idea was to use something like Dice Wars’ simplified, dramatised strategy but rather than rely on dice and luck to win fights we’d use a basic word game.

What’s nice is that you already know how to make these weapons. All you have to do is find the highest-scoring word you can that contains no more letters than the number of available troops. There are times when it looks like you don’t stand a chance because you’re outnumbered but the value of the word made under pressure is what’s important, so you can still win, especially if your opponent’s in a flap. There’s also the scope to use strategy, which you mainly need to do if your opponents are as good at making words as you. Sometimes you need to lose a few battles to win the war.

We’ve constantly tried to keep Quarrel as accessible as possible. Most refinements have been made after watching hundreds of different players play cold, without instructions or assistance, to see what they do, what they expect and so on. The players have included men, women and children of all ages, families, hardcore gamers such as strategy wargamers and Scrabble players and people who don’t play games.

We recently had almost two-dozen English-speaking Spanish teenagers playing Quarrel in a competition. It was an awesome experience. You could tell they were apprehensive at first but once they got going and realised the power they could wield to screw each other over, it turned into an insanely lively day. They were laughing and shouting and pointing and screaming at each other like they were possessed. Which of course they were: by Quarrel.

You could see their skills at finding and making words improving almost with every quarrel. We’ve seen the same thing happen with everyone who plays the game. Even the players who start by saying “I’m no good at word games” or “I don’t really play or like word games” – before you know it, they’re feeling empowered and they’re gripped.

I’ve played against you Gary and you’re particularly good at Quarrel. Got any tips?

I am the Wordinator. I am the Wordicutioner. I am… Actually, if I’m honest, I have been beaten on the Console version a few times.

I’d recommend that most players balance their attacking and defending. You don’t want to go over-reaching and messing up to leave yourself face-down in the mud with your trousers round your ankles. You also don’t want to leave other players alone for too long otherwise some of them end up wielding too much power and others really dig in and end up like limpets.

Another trick is to not get too obsessed with using all of your troops to make a word – especially when it’s the anagram and your opponent is clearly outnumbered. Sure, you get more treasure towards a Backup Troop but it’s too easy to end up losing a stalemate or running out of time in a timed match.

The first thing I do is scan for the highest-scoring letters. Then I try to make a word with them. But if nothing’s forthcoming soon enough, I compromise. There are players who take their time to make the best possible word but I prefer speed, partly because it tends to be intimidating. When someone makes a word before you, even though you have no idea if it’s any good, you can’t help but panic a little. There are a lot of these little emotional moments in Quarrel.

I’m a very aggressive player of Quarrel and take too many risks, which mostly pay off. The main reason I do that is because it’s not real so there’s nothing to lose. Most players of computer and video games that I know tend to play safe, which makes no sense to me. This is a virtual space. Live a little.

The game has been in production for a long time. Has finding the right platform and publisher been difficult?

The idea’s been around since June 2007 but we haven’t been working on it for all that time – probably half of that. We made a fair few prototypes – including a funky board game version – to quickly test out all these different ideas and rules and so on. That was time-consuming, especially as more features and rules were added because there are more things to affect each other. I’d say in the end we didn’t use at least 10 times as much as we did use.

It has been tough to find the right combination of platform and publisher. In 2008 we thought that Console was the best platform for Quarrel; Microsoft seemed very keen on broadening their audience and wanted more family-friendly games. But that all changed and since then we’ve seen the rise of iOS and the more sociable platforms, which now seem far more appropriate.

It was dispiriting seeing Quarrel so often get so close to being signed only to be knocked back. But, like the cast of Glee, we didn’t stop believing.

Tell us about making a game for iOS. Did you have to make changes to your vision for Quarrel?

One of the best things about iOS – well, touch screens full stop – is how accessible they are to everyone. People who don’t play games are unafraid to touch and poke and prod and seem better at guessing how to make things happen – how to play.

With the Console version it was awkward to figure out the best controls because everyone seems to have a different idea about which buttons should do what. That’s much less of a problem on iOS, although that does bring a share of new problems, like how best to trigger features such as shuffle and concede (buttons as it turned out).

Probably the toughest thing to do with the iOS version was cramming into a relatively tiny screen what was built for a big, widescreen Console resolution. It seems daft now but there were times when it felt like we’d never be able to fit the levels and HUD into the space.

We also needed to tweak things further, like improving the quality of the opponents – making them perform even more entertainingly and feel even more human. We took out Sudden Death from the single player experience because it was feeling redundant. Coffee Time became Bonus Time and gained a minimum time limit, which won’t mean much unless you’d played it before, but the main thing to know is that it feels better – as do some of the other new features, such as the scope to concede.

Working on the iOS version has given us a greater sense of untapped potential for Quarrel. iOS is a living platform, which opens up different possibilities that weren’t previously available to us. The start of that is the implementation of a mode like Daily Challenge. Every day the whole world gets the same level, opponents and setup – a different mix and challenge every day. It’s great comparing how well you did through Facebook and Leaderboards.

Unique to iOS we also track our favourite stats and there are some funky new Leaderboards and dozens of Achievements. The aim there was to make some of your records as public as possible and to give you a badge collection to complete. The Achievements provide a nice mix of challenges and the recognition of magic moments.

Does Quarrel have Facebook and Twitter integration?

Quarrel has awesome Facebook and Twitter integration. The Facebook posts are good; the game’s very good at noticing your finest moments, such as big wins, beating the best players, close matches – that sort of thing. There’s something supremely satisfying about the game recognising the fact that you came back from near-death to win a match and allowing you to share that with the world.

But it’s the scope for fun with Twitter that I like most. We didn’t want the posting and tweeting to be intrusive in any way and with Twitter we wanted more of a sense of sharing a match commentary, which, to be frank, proved way too difficult to implement in full.

But what we do have is the scope to tweet the best highlights. The Facebook and Twitter icons appear when you can post or tweet and you get a preview of what will be posted or tweeted before you do it – all you need to do is confirm. It’s a very quick, unobtrusive process. We use an intelligent priority system for the tweets based on what we enjoyed tweeting the most. You can tweet interesting words and definitions, which is fun.

For example, since playing Quarrel I learned – mainly from playing bookworm Rex – that what we used to call “sleep” or “eye bogies” as a kid is in fact really called “GOWL” and that “BLYPE” is a piece of skin peeled off after sunburn. These are also good, high-scoring words to add to your armoury. We give you a fresh, high-scoring “Word of the Day” every day.

But the best fun is the odd word coincidences that always raise a smile and sometimes get you giggling. For example, I’ve won a quarrel with DOG when my opponent made CAT, so I tweet “My DOG beat Dwayne’s CAT to win a quarrel by 4 points #quarrel”;  in another instance I’ve made FISH and my opponent’s made HEAD so I tweet “I dumped my FISH on Caprice’s HEAD to win a quarrel by 3 points #quarrel”.

OK, so that’s hardly hilarious, but it’s the tip of the iceberg. I’m expecting some real doozies to end up floating around the Tweetosphere.

What are Denki’s plans for the future?

As far as Quarrel’s concerned there’s so much more we can do with it. Among other things I’m in the process of figuring out how to do a fully turn-based version for two, three or four real players, which is quite a challenge but I reckon we’ll crack it – for two players anyway.

As far as Denki’s concerned I’m not sure we’ll settle down with any one particular type of game forever, like word games. Not that that’d be a bad thing or anything, just that there are so many other things we could be doing instead.

Quarrel is available in the Apple App Store now


Posted

in

,

by

Tags:

Comments

One response to “Gary Penn, Denki”

  1. Ironredboyii avatar
    Ironredboyii

    Gary Penn Zzap legend, but a poor mans Julian Rignall

Leave a Reply