Spoken Tower
Spoken Tower is a top down roguelike controlled by you voice and is Say It Labs' second larger project. From the prototyping to final product, I led the design and production of this project.
01
Top down prototype
Our given therapy goal was aimed at kids ages 4 - 8 to practice their articulation 20 minutes each day. We tried a couple of game genres but settles on a top down roguelike.
Roguelike because it fits the daily repeated practice perfectly, and top down to manage scope. We had 1 year to get this game done!
02
Scope and project management
I was able to correctly scope out the project based on the team size I would be working with and the project timeline.
After pre-production we had an exact outline of what we wanted to achieve and had locked in coding patterns, art style and project structure.
Spoken Tower got monthly internal releases in which I re-evaluated our next tasks based on playtesting, project goals and feedback.
At the time I was also a mentor to 2 interns who successfully graduated in 2025! I grew and felt comfortable in the role of project manager for Spoken Tower as I wrangled multiple interns on the development side as well as communication with the art and speech development sides of the project.
Snippet of movement script. (Some code hidden)
Example of modular script components that define enemy behavior
03
Core systems
Here is a short summary on how some of our most important systems were built.
Physics and movement
To create simple chaotic encounters we leveraged Unity's physics system. But to keep things controllable every physics call on an entity goes through the entity's "movement" script. This allows us to easily debug all forces applied to an entity
Enemy design
Enemy behavior is controlled by a behavior tree. Important recurring systems (like spawning, destruction or speech interactions) are fully supported by modular scripts. Each enemy starts as a base template and can be easily expanded by these modular components. This flow works the same for our traps and obstacles!
UI
To manage our UI we implemented this key idea: if you don't see it, it doesn't exist! This way we minimize the risk of hidden UI elements causing issues as well as a clean overview of all active UI. Calls that add / remove UI should be dummy proof and give warnings if not handled properly.
Rooms & Tower structure
To quickly develop over 100 rooms, tooling and intuitive editor tools played a key role. Behind the scenes the structure of the tower is kept simple and can easily be modified. In development we can modify the tower, skip regions, levels, etc... which was important for testing.
Snippet of UI script: Method to add a new UI element.
04
Tools
To develop Spoken Tower quickly I pinpointed key areas where additional editor tools would give us massive gains in the future.
This included a room creation tool which supported the entire room creation process and allowed both artists and developer to design rooms in a structured pipeline.
A colleague developed the behavior tree system that allows us to quickly build enemy behaviors by using modular nodes.
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05
Current progress
Spoken Tower currently has 2 / 3 environments, 100+ rooms, 20+ enemies, 4 unique wizards and is on track for a successful 2025 release!