The Spoony Blog

Ok, Word-Fu has been out for over a month now, and I’ve been really lame about updating this blog. Word-Fu is an iPhone game developed jointly between Demiurge Studios and ngmoco:) that I was working on for a couple of months. The first release was on February 26, and the first update hit the iTunes App Store not too long ago. We’re now working an a second update, to include localizations into a few other languages (which is extra challenging for a word game).

So what is Word-Fu? Word-Fu is a Boggle-like spelling game, where you’re given a bunch of dice with letters on them, you shake them up with the iPhone’s accelerometers, and then touch them to spell words. Unlike Boggle, there is no constraint that consecutive letters must be adjacent—you can use the letters in any order. If you happen to get a particularly good set of letters (such as ACEIKORTS) and you know a lot of anagrams, you can just keep spelling more and more words. You get extra time for each word spelled, so you can keep playing for quite a long time and rack up your score.

You can even reuse letters in the same word, so if you get an A, an E, and an S, and you spell long words like ASSESSES with just those three dice. There were some discussions during development with very strong opinions regarding this feature—I was in favor of not being able to reuse letters—and we ended up supporting both modes of play. The mode where you can’t reuse letters is called Shaolin Style, and it can be turned on in the Options screen; it is disabled by default.

So if you’re a word game freak, what are you waiting for? Go check out Word-Fu in the iTunes App Store today! It’s currently $1.99, although there was a special promotional price of $0.99 for the first couple of weeks after the game launched.

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Video games by adam