It all started back in march 2010 (almost 2 years ago, hard to believe how long ago that was) when we were thinking about making a new game. There were no tower defense games in the app store which were both interesting and beautiful (maybe we just didn’t find, who knows). On top of that, there were no multiplayer TD strategies at all. This is a very early sketch of the planned multiplayer modes. Three of them made it to the final version: competition, camps, and cooperative.

And the code magic began. Step by step in pretty short timeframe we’ve got ready: basic gameplay, level editor, and a few testing levels, so the game started. Also we were playing around with the assets, choosing the final style for the graphics and thinking about the storyline. The first tower took longest to create (take words “sketch”, “render”, “discuss” and “reject”, mix them in any order 10 times and add “eveyone is happy” in the end, that’s how it was). Here are just some of variations we had in the works.

If we spent the same amount of time to polish each tower we now have in the game, we would still be pretty far from completing anything. But luckily, all other 53 towers (6 types, each type has 3 development lines, and each line has 3 upgrades which is 54 possible tower upgrades) were created much faster. We actually revised some towers a few months after, but that was just our will of perfection.

We created a huge load of maps: about 80. Only 58 best ones made it into the game. Planning to add more in the future.

We’ve also worked on creeps (the enemy units you defend your bases from). Same thing happened there. We wanted to find a unique post-apocalyptic style for humans, futuristic but not fancy at the same time. Soldiers, robots, tanks, planes. Done and redone a number of times In a few months we decided to add more creeps, and colored the existing ones too. It worked perfect.

By design humans had to be technological, not fancy, in contrast to the pirates who are pretty and kind of old-school. We’ve selected steampunk as the style for the towers (however not so much left from the initial feeling of steampunk we had in earliest sketches) and cute style for the main heroes, our pirates. Hard to say who exactly they are, but we called them mini-bears at some point. So.. here we go. Meet the team!

Ever wondered what a nuke consists of? Well, it starts with an egg. Then you paint it like you do for Easter. Add a couple of stabilizers, and here you go: a nuke. We have three different nukes to choose from in Spice Invaders, each with its own look.

A game like this needs the main menu. The idea was pretty simple. Main guy (the player’s character) is standing on the stage like a boss. Menu items are on the right in a spice tank. Everything is simple and straightforward: Sketch, cleanup, draw, adjust, cut, integrate, animate, fix issues on different devices (if you call that simple…). We also added the player’s friends with their stats to the stage later. Now it’s social.

Need an icon? No problem, our artists just created about 50 variants to choose from! A bit too much. It ended up having a global poll in our office and at Chillingo to choose which one is the best. We think we selected the right one.

When you tap the icon for the first time you see the introduction movie which shows who the pirates are and what they are up to. You probably already saw this movie in the trailer. Here is how it was created. From the idea to concept art to finalized artwork. Actually the entire world shown in the video, from the first pirate with a can of spice to Earth is a single very very wide scene. At least that is how it was drawn.

This is the trailer where you can see the intro clip:

We were working with Chillingo as the publisher for the game. People there really know what they do and gave us lots of great advices on how some things should be done and how other things shouldn’t be done. Great experience. Thank you guys!

Sometimes when you are really passionate about what you do, you can’t notice the flow of time. When development was completed, we calculated the time spent. We spent about 11000 hours in total, making this game. Artists, engineers, sound designers, producers, etc. It costed us a lot more money than we expected. But the idea was simple: either make this game the best in its genre or just not do it at all. Whatever it took, we did it.

The pirate fleet is waiting for a signal to start the invasion. Spice Invasion.

1) Best App Ever 2011 Awards are finished. Charadium won in three nominations!

1st place as the Best Board Game!
3rd in Best Multiplayer Game, and another 3rd in Best Word Game!

It happened not only because Charadium is a great game, but it happened thanks to your votes! Thanks a lot!

2) Experts from IMGA reviewed over half thousand games to select 30 nominees for 8th International Mobile Games Awards in 6 categories. And Charadium was nominated in the Best Mobile Social Game category. Check out our neighbors there, all games are worth to check them out! (even though Charadium should win anyway )

If you like Charadium, please support us once more and give us a chance to win People’s Choice award! Please vote for us (yeah, registration required).

Charadium fans! Thank you for your support!

Our servers turned out to be somewhat vulnerable to such high load, our engineers are doing their best to fix all the issues and get Charadium to work perfectly as it always did and how it should.

UPDATE: We believe to have solved all server issues. Please let us know if you are still facing problems.

An On⁵ engineer fixing the Charadium engine on the fly

Now it is the time for sunset of the old Charadium and We Doodle. The date is January 15th, 2012. Sunsetting the old games will allow us to use the money and effort we used to spend on their servers’ maintenance for the new Charadium instead.

If you don’t have Charadium II yet, go grab it!

The King is dead. Long live the King!

The game name is Spice Invaders.

Spice pirates are coming to Earth to suck spice from our planet. They really need spice, and just can’t leave without it, and we have to understand them.

We’ve done our best to reinvent the tower defense genre, and we strongly believe we succeeded in that. Tons of possible towers and their improvements, a selection of “magic” effects, smart enemies try to find the safest route to the base (not the shortest), upgrade system for the character, and much much more. You can even choose the outfit for your pirate.

The really great stuff? It’s online multiplayer! You can play one of the three single player modes, or one of three multiplayer modes, one of which is cooperation. There are over 50 unique custom drawn levels set in different places on Earth. Well, writing how awesome the game is is pretty useless, you won’t get the real feeling until you try it, and you will definitely try it.

One more great thing is that it’s going to be a free app!

Update: unfortunately the launch was delayed until early 2012. Stay tuned!

Looking back we see we’ve done a tremendous job because this new Charadium is completely re-created from scratch, with new features, new game modes, new ways to connect to friends, and more! Even though tons of new stuff are already in, we have much more great features in almost-done state, and we will add them in updates. We decided not to wait till every awesome feature is finished, so that we could release the game right now for everyone to start enjoying it as soon as possible.

Turn-based games are greatly improved in the new release. Now you can see the complete history of pictures within a game, and even individual guesses by each player, check out the screenshot above. This is just one of the many new cool features.

Both iPhone and iPad versions are available from day one. Both paid and free versions will be available.

If you love Charadium and We Doodle, please support our release by spreading the word! Just write to your favorite app review sites and tell them that an awesome game called Charadium is coming out.

Thank you for your support, and see you doodlin’ soon!

We’ve finished a good playable version of Charadium and now doing a final polish to it. We’ll submit it to the App Store for Apple approval on Monday.

To tell the truth, some new cool features are not finished yet, we are going to add them right after the launch with an update. We understand that everyone is eager to play, so we decided to make it the most awesome game in 2 fast steps

And here is just a nice picture from new Charadium.

Thanks to everyone for your support and thanks for sharing good ideas for the game. We are indeed listening, and try to make the game as good as possible.

Here are a few things which should make you happy:

• ability to view your history of drawings
• smart distribution between live rooms: play more with friends and less with jerks
• anti-troll system

Also, we’ve decided on the name. It will be called Charadium! We made this choice because this name is more international.

We are pushing very hard to have the game ready ASAP, going to go feature complete this or next week. Then we will be getting to the app store. We are still planning to have it in fall, not winter

And here are some pics from filming an awesome Charadium promo clip. Seems like at last we are going to have a video which is as awesome as our games.