Press

BASICS

COMPANY: Local No. 12

RELEASED: Fall 2019

PRESS+BUSINESS CONTACT: Colleen Macklin & Eric Zimmerman (info@localno12.com)

OVERVIEW

Dear Reader: A game of literary wordplay.

Dear Reader lets you curl up and play your favorite books, turning classic literature into fun word puzzles. Unscramble passages from famous books, unlock unique puzzles, and add new books to your library—from Pride & Prejudice to the Wizard of Oz.

Dear Reader includes fifty literary classics and dozens of different word puzzles, from unscrambling anagrams to swapping lines of text. As far as we know, this is the first game where you can dive in and play with the actual written words from so many tempting books.

And it’s fun! As Michelle Ehrhardt of Kill Screen wrote, “As novel as the game is, it plays with the same confidence as a 100-year old classic.”

ORIGIN STORY

Why make a game about literature?

Three of the four original designers of Dear Reader are professors and authors in their own right. We love books. And we love games. Dear Reader is a love letter to literature. But it took us years of false starts, frustrated playtesters, and game design experimentation to get there.

Dear Reader began life as a failed experiment. On Twitter.

We had experimented with Twitter games before. A previous game called Backchatter let you bet on words you think people would tweet most during a live event. The original idea of Dear Reader was that the game would tweet a passage from a famous book. You and a friend would compete to find the most “words within the words” of the quote.

We evolved this initial idea for Dear Reader under the working title, “Losswords,” through a very long process of playtesting and iteration. We prototyped the game first on paper, then by “faking” computer output (one of us typed text, pretending to be the program), and finally through a series of extremely ugly-looking prototypes. We enlisted friends, students, and fellow designers to play the game and begged them to give us their harshest feedback. What did we learn from all of this playtesting? Designing a game for Twitter was a terrible idea.

But maybe it could work on smartphones. So we evolved the game to have a graphical interface. Along the way, we added a story about players being members of a secret literary underground, amassing hidden libraries of contraband books. The gameplay evolved to include both taking apart and putting together passages from famous works of literature. And to compliment the book-centric theme, we developed a visual language that was an homage to mid 20th century book design.

After all of this creative fermentation, we are finally ready to bring Dear Reader to the world! Dear Reader finally launched as part of the Apple Arcade in September, 2019.

FEATURES

Gaming literature.

Dear Reader uses real passages from classic literature as the raw material for the game. As you play, you collect books like Pride and Prejudice and Alice in Wonderland and play with the actual text from the book.

Literary curation.

To help us curate the of books, we have enlisted a team of “literary curators” with a background in game design and the humanities, who select our books and curate the passages that will be included in the game. These curators also sprinkle in occasional commentary as you play—which is often quite critical! Many public domain books have questionable cultural politics, despite their cultural importance and merits as literature. The 1892 novel Iola Leroy tells the story of a freed slave finding a new life in the North, a difficult narrative that doesn’t always match a more modern sensibility.

Playing with book culture.

The fact that game players will be paging through sections of Virginia Woolf or Shakespeare as they play a videogame thrills us on the level of cultural innovation. Games are an amazing context for playing with language and literature in new ways.

Algorithms for Austen.

The core of Dear Reader is procedurally generated puzzles that use existing literary texts as their raw material. The more than 20 kinds of procedural kinds of word puzzles are the result of constant iteration and playtesting. It has taken us years to figure out exactly how generate these puzzles in a way that consistently results in great gameplay while also remaining true to the original works.

Meaningful play.

While the puzzles vary considerably—from removing added lines to swapping words on a page—in general we steered the game design towards gameplay that requires the player to become a reader—to understand not just the grammar, but the meaning of the text.

Leveling up literature.

The structure of the language plays a strong role in the moment-to-moment gameplay. Playing through Alice in Wonderland is considerably easier than Beowulf! The text becomes a kind of terrain that you move through—and the texture of each work is considerably different. Combined with the many types of puzzles, the dozens of books provides a tremendous amount of variety and replayability.

Sophisticated visuals.

Inspired by Swiss Modernism and mid-century book designs like Penguin Classics from the 1960s, the clean visual style of Dear Reader is a treat for the eyes.

Audio bookscapes.

The soundtrack of the game, developed by composer Michael Sweet, pairs particular books with particular emotional musical spaces, so that the experience of Machiavelli’s Prince becomes noticeably different than the Wizard of Oz.

THE TEAM

We're a team comprised of university professors, coders, artists, literature PhD students—who also are indie game makers. Members have worked on Diner Dash, Heads Up! Hot Dogs, Peter Panic, SiSSYFiGHT 2000, Stride and Prejudice, The Metagame, Sunburn! and Swap Sword to name a few.

PETER BERRY / Lead Programming

EDDIE CAMERON / Programming

ANNA GARBIER / Lead QA & Testing

DIEGO GARCIA / Visual & Animation Design

MEHAK KHAN / Lead Literary Curation

ALEXANDER KING / Game & Economy Design

COLLEEN MACKLIN / Experience, Game & Level Design

TONI PIZZA / Literary Curation & Level Design

KARINA POPP / Literary Curation & Level Design

JOHN SHARP / Art Direction

MICHAEL SWEET / Music & Audio Design

ERIC ZIMMERMAN / Lead Game Design & Project Management