Thursday, November 5, 2015

Vowel Movements hits iOS App Store

For the past year I've been an overjoyed Apple developer in my spare time. Nothing has paralleled the experience of working with Apple. Stellar technical support. Stellar tools. Stellar programming language [Swift, not Objective C...]. Stellar documentation. Stellar infrastructure. Who could ask for anything more?

Anyway, in that year I've started a company. http://facebook.com/phreneticappsllc. Yes, I've got http://phreneticappsllc.com domain but I'm too lazy/cheap/disinterested in putting together my very own website. I know. I know. In that year I've completed my very first app and successfully passed Apple's strict app reviews. So now it's live! Not Memorex.

Vowel Movements http://itunes.com/apps/vowelmovements


The name came to me one day when I was...no I'm kidding. It just popped into my head. I like puns. And I cannot lie.

It is a word game. Sort of a mix between Boggle, Scrabble, and Anagrams. Played on a 7x7 grid of randomized letter tiles. It can be played solitaire. It can be played against any or all of Alice, Bob, or Carol, three increasingly-expert computerized opponents. It can be played, real-time, in a 2-4 player GameCenter match.

You're given 30 seconds on the clock to start. As a "novice" player [the starting rank], you've got to find a three-letter word. You can find words by moving tiles around [so we digress from Boggle here...]. You can make words only horizontally or vertically [so we enter Scrabble-likeness here]. The catch is that once a "consonant tile" is used it becomes locked in place. So as the game progresses movement becomes more and more restricted. Not to worry, though, if you find another way to use a locked consonant, it becomes unlocked [and thus, moveable] for a few seconds before it locks again. So move it while you can! You can even steal tiles locked by your opponent [so we enter Anagram-likeness here]. The winner is the player that has the most locked consonant tiles when the last tile is locked. So just because your opponent locked the last tile doesn't make them a winner. When you make a word out of tiles you also get your time replenished and get a little bit of a time bonus, to a point. It might seem too easy but the stress of finding a word...any word(!)...in under a minute...can creep up on you quick!

As you progress through the game, winning board after board, you'll notice your advancement in rank. As a novice, once you've won 50 games, you become the next higher rank. This is where the game gets...hard! As you progress in rank you also progress in minimal word length. So you go from being able to get away with finding only three-letter words to now needing to find four-letter words or better. Eventually you'll get to the point where you need to find seven-letter words or better*, which may seem impossible but I'm sure there's someone on the planet that can manage it.

*There are some special double-letter tiles such as QU, IN, CH, ER that allow you to make longer words than can fit across or down on the 7x7 grid.

You move tiles by dragging them with your finger. If a tile you're trying to move is recognized as being the start of a word the game will assume you're making that word until you move your finger in some direction indicating you're not interested in that particular word. The game does not make the words once you've arranged the tiles the way you want, you've got to swipe to claim it.

Anyway, the process of making this game has been an amazing experience. I hope it is as enjoyable to play as I think it is. Customer feedback is always welcome!

Your purchase of Vowel Movements, should you choose to do so, will go to a good cause. An upgrade to my current MacBook so that I can use Blender for 3D models on my next project. That will be another word game, and I'm calling it Angry Verbs. I'll try to post more about it here as it goes along, and be sure to drop me your email address if you're an iOS device holder and are interested in test flight'ing my games!

Cheers!