Hi, Cadence here again.

Making games is the easiest thing in the world when you dont care about art, and unfortunately, art matters a lot.

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Pronoun Palace was developed on the heels of a previous failed game that attempted to blend a visual novel with turn-based combat. At the time I was experimenting with large scale enemy sprites in a similar style to The Binding of Isaac, and a painterly approach to backgrounds that I would downscale with dithering.

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When Hazel suggested to me that I should make my own word game (after bemoaning there were no good ones), the idea for the games premisethe government stealing your pronounsarrived fully formed. I had been using Pronoun Palace as a jokey codename for the aforementioned previous project, and it made too much sense in the context of a word game. I loved the idea of pronouns having an exaggerated 1984-level dominion over reality, where the words someone has filed away under their name is what determines their literal stage of transition.

As my friend put it, word crimes beget words game plot.

1984 and classic dystopia/science fiction formed the backbone of the games artistic themes. Pronoun Palace is split into three acts, progressing the player from decrepit suburbs full of blank-faced proles to the surreal brutalist landscape of the bureaucrat class to the palace itself.

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The actual process of drawing the games sprites varies. Several enemy spritesheets were hastily scribbled in Aseprite and later cleaned up directly in Paint.NET (Aseprite is great for many things, but basic UX is not one of them). But for the most part, sprites were first drawn digitally in SAI, then downscaled and cleaned up as pixel art; generally, the more detailed or anatomical a sprite is, the easier it is for me to draw it digitally first.

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Drawing pixel art at this scale is intensive, so animations are made up of keyframes with squash and stretch. Scaling and rotation can look bad with spritework (mitigated somewhat by the size of sprites), so the animations generally avoid resting on frames that are squashed or rotated for long enough for the pixel inconsistency to stand out. I was honestly expecting people to roll their eyes at this style of animation, but a lot of the people who playtested the game specifically said they liked it.

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Speaking of pixel art crimes, you may have noticed that we use non-pixel fonts in our game. This is because 1) it would be essentially impossible to draw every letter in both cases in multiple font sizes to accommodate bigrams and trigrams and have them look good and legible on tiles, and 2) because it looks nice.

Certainly, some people will still complain about pixel consistency, but the game looks good and besides, the only other alternatives are to pay me one million dollars to spend years of my life drawing inbetweens, or have a full-blown GMTK-style mental breakdown and remake every asset in the game as a vector graphic.\n

To cap this newsletter off, lets talk about the design process behind two specific enemiesNew Cop, and Snowball.

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Pronoun Palace, with all of its dystopian world building, would obviously not be complete without a police officer enemy. Anthology of the Killer was still fresh on my mind a year ago, and I liked that the police in that game were sort of abstract caricatures, blue people with no differentiation between their body and uniform. My initial attempts at a police enemy were to cobble together shapes and body parts that resembled a police officer, but none of these were very satisfying. Eventually I landed on the idea of a cop-shaped pooltoy, mostly as a joke, and then realized was perfect.

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The pooltoy design worked on many levels. Its a symbol of a police officer standing in for the real thing, its kind of surreal, and also a little perverted. I was also thinking about the transhumanist themes of the Combine Overwatch from Half-Life 2 and the adjacency between transformation horror and porn; New Cops are people who have been transformed in some horrific way, but theyre also cute and become big and round as a defense mechanism, and they puke their guts out when brought to low health before aiming a killing blow in retaliation.

Also, the inflation valve face was inspired by the Inkies from de Blob, which is very delightful to me.

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The second enemy I wanted to touch on is more brief. Snowball is a bastard Evrart-faced cocaine ghost, but his design was also basically lifted from a boss concept a friend drew for Fiend Folio, a Binding of Isaac mod. I asked Cometz if they were okay with me fully stealing their design, and they said yes, and thats it. Really, I just wanted to bring up that Pronoun Palace couldnt have existed without Fiend Foliogiven that its how I met Hazel and Ren everyone who has helped with this projector all the bits and pieces of inspiration taken from my friends.

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Ill send this newsletter off by saying you may also recognize Ren as the RENREN, who made the amazing music for Fiend Folio and Excelsior (among many other things). The soundtrack theyve put together for Pronoun Palace is really incredible, and Im very excited to show it off in the next newsletter!

Hi! Hazel here. I\'m the second half of the team working on Pronoun Palace. While Cadence plugs away at the art and design, I work on the tricky technical stuff behind the scenes that brings everything together.

Last newsletter, we talked about spells and the depth of choices they provide to the player. This time, let\'s narrow in on one of the most versatile concepts we alluded to last time: Wildcards!

The traditional wildcard found in Scrabble and other word games is a tile with a blank face that can be used as any letter and has no value. In the context of Scrabble, that makes sense; you need to represent a wildcard with a single physical piece and you couldn\'t possibly indicate all the possible letters and values.

But we\'re making a video game. And isn\'t it more fun when the letter matters?

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Take a look at Freezer, one of the midgame enemies you might encounter. Freezer applies the frozen effect to two tiles on your board, which makes them count for both defense and damage. More importantly, it converts those tiles into wildcards!

It might seem strange for an enemy to give you such powerful tiles, but there\'s a catch. It deals a relentless six damage every turn! That\'s a lot more than you could handle with the steady trickle of plastic tiles you get naturally.

In this fight, a key feature of wildcards comes to light: A wildcard will always become the strongest letter possible.

Originally, this was where it ended; wildcards can be anything and they take on the value and appearance of the letter they represent. It took a bit of work, but I found a way to efficiently search our dictionary for the strongest word that matched a particular configuration of wildcards, and I made a compilation script to sort our dictionary optimally for that search. Then I implemented the visual display for the tile face and value changing, and updated spells to charge with wildcard faces. A satisfying and optimized implementation of a neat feature we\'d never seen done this way before.

But... why stop there? We have this whole system. Imagine the possibilities if we made it just a little more complex.

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Introducing the second kind of wildcard: numbers! If youve seen a phone keypad before, youre probably able to guess how they work. The more balanced cousin of wildcards, they can only be used as one of 34 letters, neatly displayed on the tile face beneath the number.

Prole Service alternates between launching a bunch of numbers onto the board and whacking you for big damage. Once again, using your wildcards optimally is key!

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Woof, thats a lot of wildcards. Maybe we could take a look at something simpler.

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Thats not simpler.

Its hard to talk about the technical challenges with wildcards without mentioning the other face effect in the room. Shimmering tiles have two faces, and every permutation of shimmering tiles must form a valid word. For instance, a B/C shimmering tile could be used to spell bats and cats simultaneously.

If you have experience optimizing code, the word permutations might alarm you. Suddenly, were not just checking the validity of one word, but two, or four, or sixteen Then you realize that a wildcard that works just fine for one word might not work for another. Try multiplying the possibility space by up to 26. Per wildcard. And then you have to find the strongest possible configuration, on top of that!

The obvious solution would be to just make the wildcard blank. Maybe it can just be a different letter for every word. Its kind of niche edge case, does it really matter ?

So obviously we werent going to do those. I spent several days coming up with a system to narrow the possibility space for each wildcard and to rule out invalid permutations of wildcards as quickly as possible. The word solver went from locking up completely in the most complex cases to taking seconds, then milliseconds.

Now, it just works.

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Thats the beauty of wildcards in Pronoun Palace; they just work. Its fun to just throw them into a word and see what the game gives you! Maybe youll even learn some new words along the way.

And if you thought wed stop at numbers

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You dont know us.

Next time, Cadence will be back to talk about the games beautiful art direction! You dont wanna miss it!

Hi, Cadence here. I\'m here to kick off an exciting newsletter for our upcoming game, Pronoun Palace! We\'re hoping to share some interesting insight about our game every couple weeks up until the game\'s release.

Let\'s start off by talking about one of the most important parts of Pronoun Palace, spells! Spells are activated abilities you can use to modify tiles, and you can have up to four of them at a time.

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The most basic spelland the one that the Lexicographer starts withis Letter Opener, which is simply used to remove tiles from the board. This can be an effective means of dealing with problematic letters you can\'t find a good use for, and it can also allow you to access queued letters in the preview row above your tiles.

One of the most versatile spells is Shift Cipher, which allows you to change a letter to the one before or after it in the alphabet (depending on which side of the tile you click). So A can become B or Z, and then B can become C, or Z can become Y, etc. It\'s a great tool in pretty much any battle, and just one of a few spells like it.

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Spellsand the preview rowmight look familiar if you\'ve ever played Edmund McMillen\'s The Legend of Bumbo. While flawed, the game had some strong ideas that have been largely overlooked by others working with the genre; Talia Mair cited Bumbo\'s color-coded mana system as one of the primary mechanical inspirations behind Brutal Orchestra, and to great effect.

On the topic of mana, you might have noticed those small white tiles on the edges of spells. These tiles represent the charge of a spell, i.e. how many remaining uses it has and the letter it gets charged by. Using letters in words will charge spells with those corresponding letters. So for example, if you submit the word \"rebate,\" then all spells with a charge of E will regain two charges.

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Different spells can be charged by different letters, and stronger spells tend to have less common ones. Cigarette lets you convert a tile into a wildcard, but Candy Cigarette converts a tile into a candy wildcard that heals youat the cost of having a worse charge. Of course, nothing is stopping you from using a wildcard as a specific letter to charge a spell.

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There\'s still plenty of interesting spells we haven\'t touched on, but you\'ll get to see them soon enough once the game is finished!