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[Zaid Crouch]

'Lo all! Thought it was about time I shared about the little project I've been whittling my time away on recently.

WorldPlay!
(Working Title)


A true miracle of modern engineering!

Somewhere in the night sky there lies a silent planet, deeply and dreamlessly sleeping, waiting to be re-awoken.

And on its way to that planet is a nameless robot, who holds the key to the most powerful creative force in the universe -- the power of words.

What wonders await on that planet, waiting for the right words to call them back into existence?

There's only one way to find out, right?

About the game:
WorldPlay! (wt) is a word game being developed for iPhone OS, based on the Japanese game of shiritori - you start with one word, and then have to come up with another word beginning with the final letter of the previous word, and so forth. Stages are themed around certain subjects (eg. "plants" or "weather"), although players are free to play any words, on-theme ones are more lucrative, however. Players will also earn extra points by consistently fulfilling certain criteria with the words they play (basic example would include using a certain letter, or a word that starts and ends with the same letter).

As you play through the various stages, the world will come back to life, going from barren and deserted to highly technologically advanced, with little bits of narrative interwoven throughout. The game will have a generally light-hearted, whimsical tone to it -- this is a game about the joy of creating!

Here's a current mock of what our game interface will look like:

Explaining all the elements would ruin the surprise

About the people:
There are currently two of us working on this project: myself, handling programming and design; and Cronobreaker, an amazing illustrator/graphic designer friend of mine. This is not going to be the fastest moving project of all time -- I'm also using this as an opportunity to beef up my programming chops, and fall in love with this work again. This game is about the joy of creating, but so is the process of making it :D

So far I have a working version of the gameplay interface, although some of the advanced features are still missing and/or require a fair bit of menial work to fully set up. Still, it's been an exciting process so far, and there's still so much more in the works!

A cube, or a key?

That's it for this post, but look forward to future updates!

I'm also looking for a better name, so if anyone has any brilliant ideas...  


Latest updates
Nov 2: 2nd video up on YouTube -



Nov 4: Looking for some testers  

Nov 13: 3rd video up -



Feb 10: I'm not dead! I feel fine. I feel happy!

Feb 26: Quick preview vid of the level selection screen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJGEbmly_NE

[Hima]

I like the look of this already! The game seems interesting. Too bad I don't have an iPhone

As for the game's name, you could try a game's name clinic here : http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=750.0 

Anyway, good luck with this!

[Jason Bakker]

[JLJac]

Looks sweet, but what is the challenge in it? You can't give two things the same name so you have to remember everything?

[Zaid Crouch]

Thanks for the encouragement so far, guys! :D

Looks sweet, but what is the challenge in it? You can't give two things the same name so you have to remember everything?

Sadly, but somewhat by necessity, the direct naming of things isn't gonna be a huge element in the game.

On a stage-by-stage basis, the challenge will come from trying to meet the stage goals (at this point, probably looking like a particular score), within the limitations of the stage. Basically, it will boil down to thinking of and playing words meeting a changing set of conditions, but hopefully with a little bit of planning ahead involved as well.

At the moment I'm working on the next few bits that are required to fully be able to test some of this stuff out -- it seems to work in my head, but I haven't properly prototyped it yet.

[Inanimate]

I play this game with my family whenever we are out and have nothing to do! this sounds like a lot of fun, but a pain to organize the words into different themes. Love the style!

[Zaid Crouch]

I play this game with my family whenever we are out and have nothing to do! this sounds like a lot of fun, but a pain to organize the words into different themes. Love the style!

Yeah, I play it with my students a lot too. So when I wanted to make a basic iPhone app, and was looking for something to make, it seemed an easy option. Of course, that idea then grew into this one, and here we are! 

[Dom2D]

This is a great idea, and the visual execution seems spot-on. Good luck with this 

[JaJitsu]

the robot is so cute :]

[Zaid Crouch]

the robot is so cute :]

Yes it is  Here's a bonus shot:

[supershigi]

I agree that the robot is absolutely adorable   I remember playing shiritori when I was a kid... we always had an agreement with one another that we wouldn't use words that end in "un" since no words begin with it, hehe.  Which reminds me... since there are certain letters in the English alphabet that are really difficult to make words out of, are you planning on having any rules about things like, not ending words with the letter "x"?  Anyways... this sounds like a very cute and fun game!

[Zaid Crouch]

I agree that the robot is absolutely adorable   I remember playing shiritori when I was a kid... we always had an agreement with one another that we wouldn't use words that end in "un" since no words begin with it, hehe.  Which reminds me... since there are certain letters in the English alphabet that are really difficult to make words out of, are you planning on having any rules about things like, not ending words with the letter "x"?  Anyways... this sounds like a very cute and fun game!

I know that some people have a rule that playing a word ending in 'n' loses you the game.

That said, at the moment this is looking like a primarily single player game (with that person playing most of the words), in which case words ending with unusual letters like that will probably actually earn you a bonus.

That said, near the bottom of my priority list is to try adding a multiplayer mode, and I have a couple of ideas on rulesets for that.

... Gonna wait till I have an otherwise working game before that though.

[Zaid Crouch]

So in a moment of boredom today, I threw together a very quick video of some of the stuff currently working in the game. (Mostly just the work chaining mechanics). It's short, silly, and I probably had way too much fun putting it together.





As I see I neglected to mention it earlier, I'm currently building the game using cocos2d for iPhone. I'd started putting together an earlier prototype using UIKit and Interface Builder, but I ran into a number of little problems along the way (for example, the highlighting of the shared letters was painful to set up, and ran quite slowly). I hit a few brick walls along the way there, and having lost spirit (and having quite a large pile of other quality games to go play), took an extended hiatus from the project.

All that said, work in cocos2d has been really good. I've managed to get everything here set up and working with less time and effort than it took me using UIKit stuffs (even with the additional time I needed to spend setting up input handling and whatnot). I've also added in some Scrabble letter value based scoring (which will need to get tweaked, 'cause it's not fully balanced for this game), and a much better system for work validation than I previously had. And in the process of all that, I've learnt a lot more about programming!

The next step is working on implementing the bonus conditions into the game. Once that's in, I'll have the majority of the core gamelay stuff in, and then I can see whether or not it's gonna be fun enough to justify an entire game I've got some of the basics working now, but there's a few more steps to go before it's done.

'Cause you asked, here are some of my initial ideas for the types of conditions that might appear:

• word contains a particular letter
• word starts and ends with the same letter
• word is above/below a certain length
• word is a particular part of speech (noun/verb/etc)

More updates as I have 'em! 

[Inanimate]

Wow, this is really awesome looking! Your progress is astounding, as well. How do you have a full dictionary, just curious? It's quite interesting.

[Zaid Crouch]

Wow, this is really awesome looking! Your progress is astounding, as well. How do you have a full dictionary, just curious? It's quite interesting.

Kevin's Word List Page has a number of different word lists, and I'm using a combination of them. I've then also build an OS X app that takes my source txt file, and creates a number of objects from it, which I can then import into the iPhone OS app.

Simple!

[Ashmaran]

Interesting idea, seems to work pretty well. I guess you just need to ensure the different rules and bonuses keep it fresh.

I thought about your game title, and came up with a pretty cool one:

WordStrinGame

[Inanimate]

WordString is good, the Game part isn't good.

[Zaid Crouch]

Much as I'd like a name that actually uses the chaining nature of the game, it gets really tricky to style and read it. Especially if it's with a plural s word, 'cause then you basically lose the whole point of it (ie. WordString could just as easily be "word string" as "words-string").

The more I think about it, the more I like Something Beginning With ... as a title. I worry that it's too long, but in my mind it has a lot going for it. Any other opinions?

[Zaid Crouch]

I've been looking at the project for a little while tonight, and haven't really been able to get anything done. Not to worry though, my working week (Sat-Wed) is now over, so I'm planning to get stuck into things over the next day or two. So I thought instead that I'd take stock of where things stand currently, to start putting together an attack plan for the "weekend".

Lists incoming! Although they are by no means complete or well crafted. It's just a dump of my mental to do list.

By game "layer":

Stage layer (the stage representation - top part of the screen):

• Nothing implemented save the background image This will probably get a bit of love these next couple of days.

UI

• basic stat displays (score, words, etc) are all working, although a little bit of work is still needed on font, colouring and exact positioning.
• advanced displays (bonus gauge and word conditions) are functional, although currently only displayed as text labels -- these will eventually be moved to mostly sprite representations

Input

• all buttons are in place and responding to touches!
• buttons do not currently give visual feedback when touched, and only crappy audio feedback on the keyboard buttons -- whatever's there atm is placeholder.
• in game "pause" menu needs to be set up

Game Logic

• basic game logic is working well, including validating words, checking for duplicates, and a few other functions
• all current systems are based on using NSStrings for words, this will probably end up changing to a few other specialised classes to handle other word related info
• bonus conditions and gauge are working in a rough form, along with the resulting rewards
• condition setting is completely static at the moment, in future will be modified to allow a set of conditions (and probabilities) to be loaded in depending on the current stage
• lots more top secret additions to the bonus gauge in the works!

Stage peripheral stuffs

• implement (proper) screens around the stage - stage start, stage end, etc, etc, etc.

Look forward to more updates over the next few days

Edit: typos...

[Zaid Crouch]

Err, triple post. But... new video!



Quite a bit of new stuff this time around. Got a bit of new art to chuck in some of the peripheral screens and stuff, so a lot of that's working better now. A lot of that also necessitated some rearranging of the code, and the way certain data is handled, with the net result that it's a lot easier to save, load, and pass around all sorts of game data (hence the new level summary screen at the end).

I've also got the first version of the bonus system in place, although there's still a lot to adding and refining to do.

Just to give myself a deadline to work in, I'm now aiming to have at least the one stage ready to submit to IGFMobile. We'll see how much gets crammed in by then