Word Turtle Island: early look at this typing action game

I want to talk about a game I've been creating. It's Word Turtle Island. It feels like it will go best if I wait until the stuff I have to show for work in progress makes more sense. Wait until the prototype totally speaks for itself. That's what I've been telling myself so far. Part time for about 6 months I've been prototyping this game.

It feels so darn close to that visually interesting self explanatory stage yet isn't quite there. Getting close. Soon. I should wait. That's what I tell myself.

Working on something for 6 months solo feels like forever so I'm going to talk about it anyway.

Word Turtle Island Typing Adventure

There's an island that floats in worlds where people are creative. The island is a sort of living library managed by turtle people. They gather, protect, and share an incredible amount of creative ideas, stories, inventions, recipes, sciences and magics in special books of power.

At times beings of all kinds visit the island to trade ideas, creations, and special knowledge. It's a peaceful life with unlimited learning, entertainment, and fun helping the island visitors.

Until one day a group of visitors has sinister plans to take the books of power.

You're one of the turtle people, here to use words to protect the island.

How do you protect the books?

You use your word powers, words to battle, words to create, words to escape to find ways to stop the sinister island visitors from taking the books of power.

Word Turtle Island is a 2d adventure game where you type to battle. Like the playful mood and exploring of Zombies Ate My Neighbors meets some of the action typing feel of Typing of the Dead. It makes typing your tool using single letters, words, and phrases depending on the difficulty you're playing and the turtle skills you're using to battle the sinister greedy book thieves.

Game sketches

That's a bit of the story, here's a sketch of the main character and 27 of the books of power and an animated gif capture of the game prototype so far. In the game prototype I'm using placeholder for the visuals from assets I've purchased on itch.io: Character sprites from pixel adventure 2 by @pixelfrog (enemy rock - walk, idle) and environment textures from nature dungeon by @gif for environment textures (water, rocks, grass). As to the game engine and development environment, I'm using Godot which I'm liking very much.