Monday, November 18, 2013

Game #5: "Word Origami" Released!

Game #5 - Word Origami - is done. In fact, it was done two weeks ago, but then my laptop broke, and notwithstanding all the virtues of living on Bali, replacing a Mac turned out to be a long affair.

We had a great time developing this game, and it's one of the games we eventually want to polish up for the full release. Here is a video:




As before, I am releasing the code with an open source license. The art and the sounds are for your personal use only.

There were three parts to making this game: the UI, the board creation and the multiplayer. For UI Liza did a fantastic job coming up with an original design. We started with a boring looking variation on Ruzzle and iterated on it every day to make it beautiful. It can still use a few more iterations, but we are really happy with how it looks already. On my side, coding so much UI wasn't as tedious as I imagined. I reused quite a bit of code from our prior games, - the camera module, the scenes architecture. This is a general pattern, in every subsequent game I reuse more and more modules from prior games, to the point where some kind of general game architecture is starting to emerge. I have wondered why is there no framework for Corona that does for games what Rails did for web apps?

As for the board creation, there is secret sauce to it. If you compare other games in this genre such as Scramble with Friends to Wurdle, you will notice that the former has good boards with lots of words that are fun to play, while the latter has poor boards with few words. The secret is in the board design - it looks random, but it isn't. If you are curious how to do it, you will have to study my code :) I wrote a short Ruby script to generate good boards with lots of words. And that brings another point - word games live and die by the quality of their dictionaries. A day of googling showed that there are several public domain dictionaries, including the official Scrabble dictionary. The most popular public domain dictionary among word games seems to be ENABLE2K.

The last moving part we needed for Word Origami was the multiplayer piece. This is our first game with multiplayer so there was a lot of learning for me. There are a number of options available: iOS/Android game centers or Parse and others of its ilk or DIY server. The built-in game centers are the easiest to implement, but I wanted a cross platform solution. So I took Parse out for a test drive. It went well, in less than an hour I got the game to load a board from the server. But then I started implementing the full enchilada with the user signup, login, match-making and didn't finish by Sunday (so the demo and the source code don't any networking code). It would take a few more days to complete the multiplayer code.

So far Word Origami turned out to be our favorite game. One day we want to come back to it and take it all the way to a commercial release.

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