About Left Hand of the Dragon
The Basics
The Left Hand of the Dragon is an old-school beat-em-up (think Double Dragon) where you fight by typing words with your left hand. The game adds a verbal reasoning and word-puzzle layer atop the action-oriented gameplay of the traditional beat-em-up. You're probably already good at the core mechanical skill (typing quickly and accurately), but building words from the limited pool of "left-handed" letters is considerably trickier, especially in a fast-paced combat situation. Plus, some enemies are only vulnerable to certain types of words, adding a further layer of complexity. The game is all about improvisation, mechanical fluidity, and fast thinking.
Aesthetically, the game is light-hearted and sweet: it's a world where high-waisted nerds can defeat bodybuilders through superior verbal skills. The plot revolves around two arch-rivals (Sinister Steve and Dexter Devious -- masters of the left-handed and right-handed fighting styles, naturally) scuffling over a particularly nasty game of Scrabble.
Aesthetics
The core impulse behind The The Left Hand of the Dragon is the fluidity of the typing motion, especially with one hand. Typing, of course, is a skill that many people have been practicing their whole lives. Many of us are extremely skilled at it, almost at the level of a professional musician in terms of dexterity. And typing with just one hand amplifies this sense of fluidity: type the word creates or exaggerated very quickly, for example, and you get a little, satisfying sense of mastery.
Most typing-based games treat fluidity as an end goal, but here we use it as a starting point for direct-control, action-based gameplay: moving your character in real time and typing to attack. Because most players are assumed to be competent typers at the start, we could build challenge in other ways -- mostly through the task of constructing words from a limited pool of letters, as in games like Boggle or Scrabble. This challenge arises naturally from the control setup: if one hand is moving your character, the other one can only cover half the keyboard, and choosing words becomes more difficult. (Incidentally, there are thousands of common words that can be typed with just the left hand... although it's hard to think of them in the middle of a fistfight.) During gameplay and boss fights, we can ramp up the challenge with enemies that restrict your choices even further. For example, one enemy is only vulnerable to words that begin with a vowel.
When we began building up the word-puzzle aspects of the game, we found ourselves entering a realm of wordplay that essentially set the tone for the game's aesthetic and narrative.