Letterpress by Loren Brichter of Atebits

http://www.atebits.com/letterpress/

by tuhin • 14 years ago

51 25 14 years ago

It's one hell of a good looking app and according to an article on The Verge it apparently clocked in at under 7k LOC. Looking forward to seeing what comes out of Atebits over the coming years.

wmeredith• 14 years ago

Good lord the App Store search is lame. I get three results when searching for "Letterpress" and this game isn't among them. In fact, I just spent about 5 minutes trying to find this game at all and I can't. Boo.

twootten• 14 years ago

I think it takes a little while for new additions to get indexed into the search. Links will take you there though...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/letterpress-word-game/id5266...

fieldforceapp• 14 years ago

I really like this take on asynchronous gameplay UI, it's tough get the "glance" aspect of the UI correct and yet make it compelling. The "Draw Something" problem where you're drowning in partially played games perhaps led to it's demise, a victim of the UI's inability to scale?

(Sigh... should have spent more time studying design / HCI in school...)

spartango• 14 years ago

No one says you can't study it even now (except perhaps your calendar)... One classic starting point is "The Design of Everyday Things"[1].

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

mnicole• 14 years ago

The [free] Coursera HCI course is going on right now, too.

whalesalad• 14 years ago

Very fun/cool UI. It's surprisingly reminiscent of Metro, err, Windows 8 Style UI. You could wrap an iPhone in some clumsy metal/plastic Windows phone wrapper from a year ago and you'd have no idea what OS was powering this.

MehdiEG• 14 years ago

I haven't tried the game yet but at first sight, it seems to be heavily inspired by Meego Harmattan / Symbian Belle - a beautifully designed UI (at least in its Meego implementation) that unfortunately never went anywhere due to Nokia killing both Meego and Symbian before it was even released.

haraball• 14 years ago

Very fun and beautiful game, just tried it out. I also like the solution that you can play up to 2 games for free, and then you can pay for it to be able to play more at the same time.

masklinn3• 14 years ago

A very similar model to Outwitters's (https://itunes.apple.com/app/outwitters/id432969074?mt=8)

reiichiroh• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, Outwitters was a sales disaster: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/10/outwitters-sales-disas...

chrislloyd• 14 years ago

I love the app, but this isn't how you win friends on the internet: http://cl.ly/image/0Y401a2D1c2R ;)

wmblaettler• 14 years ago

I am sure it uses a standard dictionary such as SOWPODS, which excludes proper nouns among other things.

tehwebguy2• 14 years ago

This game rules.

It's fun, it's easy to play and it's got the kind of interface that feels very simple but actually has insane attention to detail.

Edit: You don't have to use only contiguous letters, if you've played a lot of Scramble that may take some getting used to.

verisimilidude2• 14 years ago

I'm going to love this game right up until someone creates a cheating app/site.

tehwebguy2• 14 years ago

Sounds like a good weekend project to me!

verisimilidude2• 14 years ago

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 while.

jowiar• 14 years ago

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.

greenmountin• 14 years ago

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.

speg• 14 years ago

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

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