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Contest: Win a Palm or Pocket PC Game with this Word Puzzle

To the left is a screen shot of WordPop, our best selling word game. Two ways to win. (1) Try to find the longest word you can, and then submit it to our forum. Just like the rules when you play WordPop on your device, each letter in the word must be adjacent to the next, for example, RIPE. (2) Find at least 10 words and be one of the randomly selected winners.

  • The player who submits the longest word wins a copy of a Smart Box Design Game
  • (if a tie then the first one to submit wins)
  • Two random winners will be picked from additional submitted words
  • Contest ends August 31, 2007
  • Winners will be announced in the next newsletter and / or e-mail
  • (make sure to register at the forum so we have your e-mail on record)

We’re looking forward to seeing your words

Click Here to Submit Your Words at the Forum

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WordPop New Features Continued

Here are some more features coming to WordPop this fall. All of these features have been suggested by players, either at our bulletin board or direct e-mails to me.

Add Treo Support– I am a big fan of the Windows Mobile Treo line, but it has a unique square screen, while most Windows Mobile devices have a rectangle screen. To support the Treo with the highest quality possible, the art has to be redrawn. Jim Patterson, Smart Box Design’s lead artist, has finished redoing the art and it looks FANTASTIC!

 

Allow a single Undo– When WordPop was originally created, I wanted to make sure the game was challenging, and it is, any by the many wonderful e-mails I have received. However, there have been many requests for an Undo, not to make the game easier, but because sometimes a player would make a mistake. For example, dropping the bonus tile in the wrong spot or rotating the screen by accident. A single Undo will be added to the menu for those rare occasions when a mistake needs to be corrected.

 

Allow the letter “I” as an acceptable word – In creating the word list there are many rules, such as no abbreviations, hyphenated words, and no words that can be capitalized, such as a name or place. For that reason the letter “I” is not accepted as a word while “a” is. I could remove the “a” but this might cause confusion, so I am breaking the rules for the letter “I” and it will now be accepted.

 

Display the Letter When Blank Bonus Tiles are being used – When a word is created it shows up in the word creation area at the top of the screen. When a blank tile is being used, we simply put in an underscore to show that a blank tile is being used there. Several readers have asked for the letter to appear. Thus a lower case letter will appear there and in the “Best Words” screen. You might be saying, “Huh!” the problem is in some cased the player was not exactly sure what word was made with the blank tile, this will make the process complete. This feature is one that is better understood playing the game then describing it.

 

I am looking forward to the new version of WordPop coming out this fall.

 

Keep those comments coming!

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Watch Out For Falling Tiles

Progress continues with WordPop. I’ve been working on the interactivity of the letter tiles lately. In my prototype, you can now select and “check” a word. It will be removed and the other tiles will fall to fill in the gaps. As a nice side-effect, having falling tiles made the rotate feature easy to add on so I’ve got that plugged in, too.

I’m still not validating the words against a dictionary, so you can make a word out of any string of tiles right now. Validating and scoring will be next up followed by proper letter randomization. I’m not sure how to show you an animation of the letters popping and falling, but here’s one showing you selection and the building word appearing above the gameboard.

wordpop-with-selection.png

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WordPop New Features Continued

Here are some more features coming to WordPop this fall. All of these features have been suggested by players, either at our bulletin board or direct e-mails to me.

Clear Best Words List – When I first designed WordPop with my team we did not think that clearing the best words was necessary. But an interesting problem arose. Sometimes a player makes a word that is really high scoring but is embarrassing, such as,…hmm, I don’t think I will give you an example but if you get the point. Because the word is embarrassing the player does not want to show their Best Words to anyone. The next version will have a button to clear the Best Word list.

Clear High Score List – Similar to Best Words, I did not think clearing was needed but many players e-mailed me that they wanted to start over or their was a score from a friend or family member they wanted to remove. Players will be able to clear the Easy, Medium, and Hard High Score Lists individually.

New Word List – I have had hundreds of suggested words sent to me. Many of them did not make the cut as our word list does not include acronyms, abbreviations, proper names, or hyphenated words. However, we have added hundred of new words including all the official Scrabble two and three letter words and their plurals, inflections, etc. This new word list will also be added to Word Monaco Solitaire for Windows Mobile too.

Splash Screen – The splash screen appears immediately upon launching the game and serves the purpose of showing something while we check the resolution, load in files etc. A minor feature but important.

Check back often as there are still a lot more features that we are adding to make WordPop even more fun and a great value.

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Laying Tiles

Not as much progress this week as I would have liked, but I did finish a class to handle the letter tiles. This led me to thinking through just how I would handle the game state at runtime and the data structures involved. It seems like a little thing, but later on, it will have a much larger effect. The wrong data structures can cripple me for weeks. The right one makes things go quite smoothly. So, some serious closed-eye thinking was employed in something the user will never see.

I do hope the benefit pays off in performance and stability, however. Now, without further ado: letter tiles!

Game Board with Letters

By the way, don’t be frightened by the letter distribution. I haven’t started using our carefully balanced letter maps, yet. It would have to be some very evil difficulty to give you two Xs, two Zs, and four Qs.

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