Well, willya look at that!
I finally got through the gauntlet of stuff one must do to put up even a simple game on Steam.
It's surprisingly robust. You have to provide approximately 2,912 screenshots and assets of your game in about 387 different sizes and formats. (Okay, I might be exaggerating.)
Other games might be able to fill that, but a word puzzle game has only so many variations on a screenshot...
That said, most everything has been approved for Wordy Rain's release and I'm doing some final bug fixing and polishing until the date I'm allowed to go live, which will be next week!
The Story of Wordy Rain
...or, maybe think twice when starting your hobby projects in case you ever want to ship them.
Game Development Talk Ahead!
If you're not a fellow game developer but are interested in game development and choices game developers make, then strap in! If you're not any of those things...well, I hope you'll stick with me!
I've always had a game in development since I was about 10 years old, something I could work on that was all mine and wasn't beholden to any deadline or marketing demographic. (This is, of course, not great if you intend to try and sell games. But I digress.)
A couple of years ago I needed a project that was simple. Something that didn't have a lot of depth. Something that wasn't really ambiguous. Something that could give me quick wins in short spurts of time.
And that's what Wordy Rain would become: a pretty simple concept with very defined gameplay and well-scoped to make progress on in a reasonable time.
I would work on Wordy Rain at night, and its simplicity meant that I could spend an hour or two -- all I really had time for given a really busy day job already at Meta Research Labs and two young kids at home -- and make quick progress.
That quick progress was like pushing a button for endorphins over and over. Wordy Rain really fit that need.
I chose Unreal to work in because I'd spent years in that engine most recently. I've made games in countless tech: Unity, Unreal, bespoke engines, Lua scripting, you name it.
While at Meta Research Labs I was actually working in Unity and Unreal simultaneously on two different projects at the same time; that was wild.
I liked Unreal, though, because its Blueprints system (a way of building gameplay without needing to code, for those who aren't game devs) allowed me to prototype things really quickly. I can code, but I don't call myself a programmer. Blueprints allowed me to move fast.
Using 3D for 2D
It's possible to make a strictly-2D game in Unreal...but I don't know anyone who's actually done it.
There's an entire system and way of doing that in Unreal that I wasn't familiar with. But I did know how to quickly place cameras and objects and use gravity for falling things.
So I thought: I'll just do that. I'll put a camera that will never move into a 3D scene and use gravity to make 3D blocks fall. Simple!
And it was. Between that and using Blueprints, I got the basics of Wordy Rain stood up really quickly, leaving me free to play around with some gameplay ideas. Because it was 3D, I could put pretty background scenes with actual movement and effects behind the game board.
(Right now, there is only one scene, but future Wordy Rain releases will have more background scenes to choose from!)
The more I worked on the game, the more I realized I did want to ship this game at some point.
Uh-Oh...
But here's the thing: casual gamers typically have modest systems to play games on. They're not exactly running on the latest 3D graphics cards.
And I had chosen an engine known for making AAA games with high-end graphics, and made my game entirely in 3D with actual visual effects and everything.
All of that would make for a non-trivial performance overhead.
So I've been spending a fair amount of time making Wordy Rain run better on lower-end systems.
I'm hoping I accomplished this, but I only have so many systems to test on at home. (Which is more than most people have -- between my game developer husband and my two kids with their hand-me-down PCs, we have a small range of specs.)
So if you have a lower-end system and you want to let me know how the game runs for you, I'd love for you to test it this week! I have a small set of beta keys and will prioritize people who have low-end systems who are willing to test and report back.
Please let me know if you want to test!
Wishlist on Steam today!
Want to know when Wordy Rain is ready play? Wishlist it today on the Steam store! And stay up to date with this newsletter because I plan to add more to Wordy Rain after release: more powerups, more gameplay options, more background scenes, and more!
Thanks for reading the Wordy Rain story, friends, and you'll hear from me again when the game is ready to buy!
-Caryn
June 2025
Shadowdog Games
