I was playing this game all afternoon. Ten I came home and turned my phone off silent. Wow. The attention to detail in the sound effects want me to go back to my review and give it another star.
Letterpress by Loren Brichter of Atebits
21–26 of 26 posts
Re: Letterpress by Loren Brichter of Atebits
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like a good weekend project to me!
True! Let me fix that. I'm going to love this game right up until someone else creates a cheating app/site. Seriously though, cheating apps totally ruin these word games. I remember loving Scrabulous (remember that name?) right up until everyone figured out how to cheat. Then the game just became tedious. Hopefully the tile-taking mechanic in this game will introduce enough strategy to keep play interesting for a whi…
But it's not just about who can play a few 10-12 letter words. You need to use the corners and the squares around them to deny your opponent from quickly flipping them back to their color.
Re: Letterpress by Loren Brichter of Atebits
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
A very similar model to Outwitters's ( https://itunes.apple.com/app/outwitters/id432969074?mt=8 )
Unfortunately, Outwitters was a sales disaster: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/10/outwitters-sales-disas...
Damn, hadn't seen this, makes me sad. Outwitters is a very nice game (and for such a heavily networked game, freemium makes sense as you need to build a big community for playing to be interesting)
Re: Letterpress by Loren Brichter of Atebits
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, Outwitters was a sales disaster: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/10/outwitters-sales-disas...
Outwitters main problem was the teams were functionally identical so there was little point in paying for them. Yes the uber units were different but in actual gameplay these weren't used at all. If there were other noncosmetic differences, this wasn't apparent to me as a casual player. I guess I spent around $20 in Hero Academy but I spent $0 for Outwitters, a game of similar polish and quality.
> Yes the uber units were different but in actual gameplay these weren't used at all.
That's not completely true, but it is true that they're not hugely common to use: because of their price, misusing them will likely break you, whereas using them does not usually have an absolutely critical impact on the game. They may be slightly more easy to use in pair games.
> If there were other noncosmetic differences, this wasn't apparent to me as a casual player.
Nope, there aren't, probably to avoid the balance issues of e.g. Hero Academy.
Re: Letterpress by Loren Brichter of Atebits
#25I love the app, but this isn't how you win friends on the internet: http://cl.ly/image/0Y401a2D1c2R ;)
I am sure it uses a standard dictionary such as SOWPODS, which excludes proper nouns among other things.
Re: Letterpress by Loren Brichter of Atebits
#26I'm going to love this game right up until someone creates a cheating app/site.
The game is far more strategy-dependant than vocabulary-dependant. The word list comes nowhere near being exhausted on a given board within a game. Now, is it possible to write an AI? Sure, and actually, an AI-contest for this game would be a whole lot of fun. It's not simply "generate words" - you could give everyone the word list and the game would still play well.
Not true, for example I've been ruining the game for the past couple hours with a quick (greedy) AI.
Play a couple rounds with words like 'tetrasyllabics', where you completely reverse their blocks, and people just give up :(
Actually, I'm hoping there's someone else out there doing this too, because then I'll need to throw in the blocking logic.