A Melbourne-made video game has skyrocketed up the charts around the world, leaving the likes of Words with Friends and the NYT’s Wordle in its dust.
Gubbins is a mostly free-to-play, mobile word game featuring quirky characters and the ability to swear your head off (letters permitting). It also has an addictive creative stage at the end of every puzzle, enabling players to get artistic with their words.
“It’s essentially Solitaire meets Scrabble with hilarious friends wreaking havoc.”
– Studio Folly
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Reaching out to Studio Folly during the heat of their launch day felt like… Well, folly. But co-director Jessica Shipard responded in a flash, and we teed up a chat. From tips and tricks to the meaning behind the name, team Gubbins had plenty to share.
You’ve just launched to a mega reception. How are you all feeling?
I’m very happy / overwhelmed / in need of some time with my phone in flight mode. I feel like my eyes are glued open from looking at a million notifications. Honestly seeing all the hilarious postcards from players is everything we could have hoped for.
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Where did the idea for Gubbins come from?
The idea really came from us taking stock of what we had to work with between Darcy and I. With no gamedev experience before Studio Folly, but a decade working as a communication designer, my skill was with typography and colour, and Darcy having spent 7+ years at League of Geeks working on Armello was very passionate about board games, and systemic design, so a word game just made sense.
I was also really into games like Fluxx and Loveletter, Two Dots and Grindstone, which feature a lot of modifier mechanics and Darcy was also hype on roguelike mechanics, so we were playing around in that space. I also did a mockup of the staggered tiles in Figma that eventually became our draw pile, which was a pretty pivotal development. Then once we got artists on board the psychedelic world begged to be let out and we indeed let it.
It’s a free game, making it accessible to so many. How do you come to that decision?
We initially tried to get into a subscription, and while they seemed to dig the game it didn’t pan out. Without an existing audience premium goes almost nowhere in the current mobile market, so we basically had no choice. We were very reluctant with free to play micro-currencies and ads, but are happy with what we landed on. We love the game a day ritual of word games, then allowing the super fans to pay more to play as much as they like. So far it seems to be working, we’ve had tonnes of messages from people proudly letting us know they bought the upgrade.
Were you fans of Words with Friends, Wordle and other similar word games?
We both played quite a bit of Wordle and the Wordle inspired games that fell out of it. We also love the NYT Crossword. The Wordle craze happened when we were a year into development which was a pretty wild time! We weren’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing for us, but it seems like a good thing, lots of newly motivated word game players looking for something new.
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You’ve stepped this up for those living in the gutter like me. What are the limitations on playable words?
The dictionary is one of the things Darcy and I have disagreed about the most. I felt like it should be as close to the Scrabble dictionary or something similar as possible, Darcy insisted names and even meme words should go in too. We did a poll at one point and people were largely keen on the latter, which surprised me but we leant into it! But yes we have swears, but we also have measures in place so players aren’t presented with hateful words or the ability to make them.
Who or what is Gubbins?
Gubbins is a ye olde English word that means odds and ends, miscellaneous items, even trash. The word perfectly captures what we wanted the Gubbins to be, little slices of life that modify gameplay.
Thematically Gubbins can only be inanimate objects or forces of nature, but the line can be a little blurry, like a dog can’t be a Gubbin but a flower could, a trumpet can be a Gubbin but not the concept of music. For some reason we also decided there’d be a giant.
Any tips for new Gubbins players?
Yes! Firstly don’t think of it too much like Scrabble, there’s no benefit to interlocking words, the board is more of a workspace and you can lock in words whenever you like.
Our best tip is probably to think about ways to make your words longer, like take the word “long”, you could add “be” on the start and you’d have a 6 letter word, then if you use the “ing” from a trumpet gubbin, you’d have 9 letters and that’s the max.
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Also we added the word combo feature very late in the game, at the advice of a couple of very smart game developers and one internet celebrity. Basically if you lock in words one after the other you get double the points, so that helps a lot with racking up the points.
What’s one thing you want people to get out of Gubbins?
An outlet where people can feel proud of themselves whether it be for a high score, a hilarious meme or artfully composed postcard layout. We particularly hope it’s a source of comfort in difficult moments in life.
Gubbins is out now on iOS and Android.
