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Lovely, I like word games, I've left you a review. Why did you decide to go portrait instead of landscape? What was time spent on design (not the graphics, bu

Lovely, I like word games, I've left you a review. Why did you decide to go portrait instead of landscape? What was time spent on design (not the graphics, but planning the interactions and the rules of the game) versus time spent on implementation? edit: Also, do you have any go-to books that you use for game/app development?

jazzychad 15y ago
Portrait because "Words with Friends" and "Hanging With Friends" are portrait, so people are used to that, and because I wanted to be able to play with one hand (while hanging onto the subway handrail, eg). Idea design: one night maybe. Wanted to think of the simplest yet compelling rules for a word game that used scrabble-like tiles. Some interactions were tweaked along the way because of the physical layout on the screen, but most everything was thought up that first night. Time on implementation: a few days. Getting the whole game engine working was pretty fast, then just integrating the logic with the interface took a while. Learned about (and added) multi-player through Game Center in one sit-down session on a Friday night. The part that took the longest (it feels like) was just entering all of the Leaderboard and Achievement data into the Game Center console on Apple's site. Then of course writing the logic in the game to trigger each achievement when they should be unlocked. The graphics: several hours, probably a total of 10. Tweaking the tiles took the longest. edit: added to answer parent's edit: I don't have go-to books really. This was the first game I've ever written (except for Rock, Paper, Scissors in BASIC when I was 9). So I just was learning as I went. Usually I just use Google/Stack Overflow for technical questions, but for the game part I just mashed together observations I had made while playing other apps (especially word games lately).

jazzychad 15y ago

Portrait because "Words with Friends" and "Hanging With Friends" are portrait, so people are used to that, and because I wanted to be able to play with one hand (while hanging onto the subway handrail, eg). Idea design: one night maybe. Wanted to think of the simplest yet compelling rules for a word game that used scrabble-like tiles. Some interactions were tweaked along the way because of the physical layout on the screen, but most everything was thought up that first night. Time on implementation: a few days. Getting the whole game engine working was pretty fast, then just integrating the logic with the interface took a while. Learned about (and added) multi-player through Game Center in one sit-down session on a Friday night. The part that took the longest (it feels like) was just entering all of the Leaderboard and Achievement data into the Game Center console on Apple's site. Then of course writing the logic in the game to trigger each achievement when they should be unlocked. The graphics: several hours, probably a total of 10. Tweaking the tiles took the longest. edit: added to answer parent's edit: I don't have go-to books really. This was the first game I've ever written (except for Rock, Paper, Scissors in BASIC when I was 9). So I just was learning as I went. Usually I just use Google/Stack Overflow for technical questions, but for the game part I just mashed together observations I had made while playing other apps (especially word games lately).