That's not the name of it though. It's called Happy-WordZ, made with Allegro 5 like the last one... I've got promo codes if anyone wants one. Here's a link to the game on the store:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/happy-wordz/id386005993?mt=8

And on my site:

http://www.nooskewl.com/node/48/

And some screenshots:

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Looks very nice! I love the graphics style; very professional looking. If I had an iPhone/etc, I'd get it.

Thanks, and if you had one I'd give you a promo.

How long did it take you to make that game? (Man hours)

It looks good. I like the cartoony font.

kazzmir, I'm not sure... I had the server mostly done a few years ago. I had to update the server so you couldn't cheat (since it's running on a dedicated box now), and add a few things... that might have taken a day or two. The game probably took 3 days to make, but then I went back and fixed and tweaked a bunch of stuff, so a couple more days. The graphics took 2-3 days plus a day for me to format them the way I needed, and the music took maybe 2-3 hours to make. It's not a massive project. I still hope I have time to add achievements to it using Apple's Game Center when it's ready. Make a few more improvements along the way. But time has been flying by me and I have a ton of stuff to do lately :/.

Thanks amber.

Let me know when somebody beats my high score, so I can reclaim the spot.

The game is okay. It could use more variety, like different boards and maybe up to five letter words (depending on the board).

Oh, so you're Mateo? You took my high score away from me ... But that's ok, it gets reset each day .

No, I took it from some guy named TREOT.

27 points is the highest I've gotten in this game in recent memory. Good job. I have no idea what I got on the mobile phone version years ago.

I would give it a try if I had a promo code.
I can't tell what it is right now from the current descriptions provided though.

Just go for broke. No sense spelling words unless you have five Zs and a couple of Qs.

28 points last game.

Did you make a dictionary of all of the high scoring words?

No... Just look at the points per letter and use them. My highest has been fez, zap, zip (32). It's hard to get much higher than that, assuming each word needs two consonants and a vowel.

It's hard, but not impossible. There are a few combinations that are worth 35 points.

Nice looking game man. Was not aware that allegro 5 is iPhone capable. I've been doing all my 2D stuff using OpenGL es and quad drawing.

I hope you do better than my universal ipad/iphone puzzler game, beer machine. I made it do high and low res sprites for iPad, iPhone retina, and standard def, tons of testing only to get slammed by 1 stars over problems with jailbroken-only systems. :-(.

Thanks Mike. Indeed, jailbreakers are kind of annoying. I've found my first game on dozens of pirate sites... one of them appeared one day that actually had a counter, over 200 downloads. I wonder how many pirated copies have been downloaded in all... nothing I can do about it really, other than put in some crap protection against it, but I don't bother.

Just don't fall into the trap of thinking that one pirated copy means one lost sale.

Though I wonder what you can do about jail broken systems, try and run differently on them? Maybe just run a demo mode, telling people to run stock or stfu?

How is that a trap? Neither you nor I nor the person who is pirating the game can say that they would have bought it or wouldn't have bought it if they didn't pirate it. THe fact remains, if you want the game, law requires you to pay for it. You can't say "I would have made XXX$ more if people didn't pirate it", but you can say, when the numbers are high, that you definitely did lose some sales over it.

I'm not claiming that.. Just saying that one pirated copy does not equal one lost sale.

You can, but I don't think its accurate.

Then you live in Lala land where pirates are the good guys and it's all sunshine lollypops and rainbows.

When did I say what they did was a good thing? I didn't. You're assuming.

What says that a person that went to the trouble of rooting their phone, and dealing with the issues that causes, would actually have bought the game? I find it far more likely that they'd have never bought the game at all.

Emphasis mine.

If the numbers are high enough, the probability approaches 1.

That I can agree with. Given download numbers in the millions, it is more likely.

I'd guess about 5 to 10 percent loss of sales. Just a feeling.

Your logic is so ridiculous it's not even worth debating. Yes, millions of people jailbreak their phone because they don't want to pirate stuff but do anyway.

Where did you even get that I even remotely implied such a stupid idea?

No, they jailbreaked their phone so they don't have to pay for stuff. Period. Which is why its more likely they'd have never paid for that stuff. If they think its worth it to deal with the headaches that come from jailbreaking a phone, than to pay a couple bucks for a few apps, then the sale was lost a long time ago.

Logic. Use it.

You boggle the mind. I was using logic. You seem to be the one having issues with logic.

Logic can't predict human motivations or results.

So let me get this right. To you logic is: people who steal are going to steal anyway because they make preparations to steal. In no way did you consider what they would do if they didn't make preparations for stealing.

But they did. So sale lost.

Now in the off chance that it was impossible for them to jailbreak (unlikely), I find it very unlikely that they'd buy many apps. Often times people who download a pirated app, they either don't use it, or use it once and forget about it. And if their intent was so flimsy, they'd never buy the app to begin with. so no sale.

I've actually heard of people hoarding pirated apps and never using them. not even once.

This is pretty close.

http://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/597936/775462#target

What you're saying is like, to put it in a grander scale, it's not a life lost if someone gets murdered because the killer was going to do it anyway, so the person had no chance to live. But that doesn't surprise me really... you always think in worst case scenarios.

No that would be blowing things out of proportion.

I just think its not worth worrying too much about pirates, they aren't who you're selling to. Make your product worth it for the people who will buy it, and you've done your job. Anything else is a waste of time.

I agree with that. I don't put any kind of counter measures in my games...

The most likely scenario would be that they wouldn't buy an iPhone if they couldn't jailbreak it.

Does the appstore even work on a jailbreaked device?

Yeah, apparently it does.

Congrats for the game Trent!

sorry for being late

Thanks vbovio. I've got a contest running now on TouchArcade. Mateo may be interested . Perfect game wins a $15 iTunes gift card: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=65039

Does a 34 win a $14 card?

34 points wins you a whole lot of try again.

For fun, I ran a simulator that was programmed to try to get the one perfect game that I'm aware of. Assuming you only play just for that one game and the letters are uniformly randomly selected, the expected number of tries to get it are 1 in 12,000.

I'm not sure what the actual numbers are. There are about 4 or 5 combos that give 35 points. The letters are not evenly distributed, but more common letters come more often than the higher point letters. Not sure if these things will harm or hurt the probability of a perfect game. I know I've been one letter off a couple times though, and that letter just didn't come up. I haven't played anywhere near 12 000 games.

Having multiple ways to win would increase the chances more than the uneven distribution would hurt it. But like any expected value, you could reach it after 1 game, or 1,000,000 games...

Yeah, of course.. I think it's not an unattainable achievement though. I havent looked at the stats lately, but only a few thousand games have been played online so far. If a bunch of people really dedicated some time to it, I think one of them would get it. But obviously, just for a $15 gift card, it's not worth putting any extra effort into it, you just hope you get it during normal play.

That's an awesome way to alienate your customers. Kudos! You should join some large corporation somewhere.

If the device is jailbroken, they are unlikely to be actual customers.

But yeah, trying to do anything clever like that is bound to alienate some portion of your customer base. So its not often worth it.

For anyone who doesn't have an iphone or ipad but has a Windows or Mac machine, I put up Windows and Mac versions of the game on the nooskewl.com site mentioned in the OP.

Your Windows version spawned x number of Windows (MANY) and then crashed. I just hope it didn't do any harm. Better not have been malicious.

I don't see how that's possible. It calls al_create_display once.

EDIT:

Did you run it in your VM by any chance? Or with Wine or something like that? Don't worry, it's not malicious.

Yes, it was in my VM. It worked better when I specified OpenGL in allegro5.cfg, but eventually that caused the entire VM to spontaneously reboot. It's probably my VM's fault though, not yours.

Allegro 4.9 does crazy things in VMs, just as you describe.

It probably has to do with mind control and virtualization conflicting, resulting in a temporal paradox.

I'd think that indicates A5 is possibly a bit too low level at the hardware level or something. I just saw this in examples/ex_vsync.c starting at line 168

      /* Let's not go overboard and limit flipping at 1000 Hz. Without
       * this my system locks up and requires a hard reboot :P
       */

That's a hugely asinine stereotype/generalization to make.

The jailbroken percentage is pretty small. All the reports on it are skewed in favor of higher jailbroken numbers because app crackers download apps they wouldn't even consider buying (wouldn't you, if everything was suddenly free?).

Even with this large skew, it usually seems to be around 5%. Though it does vary from app to app, I think I saw one guy who had over a 100% jailbreak ratio. But this was a low sales volume app, so it doesn't really count.

I'd say it's an indication of a bug. The Linux window creation code has no side effects like this when run in a VM - so instead our D3D window creation code simply is doing something wrong.

That comment in ex_vsync likely isn't serious (there's a smiley following it) and is just to prevent something like this:

while(1) {}

Which isn't low level but "locks up"/uses all remaining CPU on whatever system you run it on.

How did you come up with 35 as a perfect game?

I had been gunning for FEZ + ZAX | ZIF (35), but replacing FEZ with the newly discovered VIZ gives an unlikely 37.

I was hoping for a good VIZ/VIZ combo, but the best I can find is 35 with LEV.

You need to add a word that starts with X so I can stop getting angry when it starts out with an X.

XXX would be good. Then I'd try to get:

X X
X X
XXX

VIZ is in there? Well I ran a program over the list years ago to find the best combos. VIZ may have been added later.

This is the perfect game to play while taking care of business. I've been doing a lot of that lately, thanks to Taco Bell.

The game mocks me. Twice I had a 35-point game going, needing one letter with four skips. Give me that A!

Once it opened up with L-E-V-I. I got the next V after a skip or two, never to to finish with needed I-Z. I started to cry.

My wife and I both downloaded this on our iPhones last night. For whatever reason, the game is fairly addictive and I could see this being a fun option when I've got a minute or two to kill. My wife loves these kinds of little word games and we put off starting the movie we were going to watch for 30 minutes or so while we each kept saying: "Okay, just one more game, almost had an awesome score that time."

Comments/feedback from the two of us below (if you're interested - if not you can just stop reading now, I guess).

• It's often frustrating to receive the same exact letter three or more times in a row, particularly if it's an X or something less useful). It almost feels like if the letter doesn't change it shouldn't count as a skip (or it should always have to be a different letter, just for variety).

  
  

• It would be nice if we weren't bounced all the way back to the main menu after every game.

  
  

• On the name submission page, is there a reason for the 5 character limit (or requirement)? Along similar lines, it looks like you can edit (backspace) your name as long as you haven't typed the 5th character, but once you hit the last character it submits immediately (making it impossible to correct if you select the wrong last letter by accident).

Overall the game is enjoyable, though, and I expect it will get plenty of play in short segments, particularly during the already mentioned "business" trips above.

Thanks, and nice work!

Thanks. Happy-WordZ is kind of a pet project. Not something I'm going to spend a lot of time on, due to other projects, but something I might update from time to time if I get unoccupied. There's a small update coming soon. It's nothing big, actually the opposite, it uses about 50% as much space on your ipod... that and there's a link to a stats page that gives some stats about todays games and averages for all games, and weekday averages. Also there's a section for past 1st place daily winners (all of this starting Sept. 1 so there's already some data there).

I completely agree regarding the skip a letter annoyance. If I were to tweak anything regarding gameplay, it would be to never give the same letter after a skip. The random letters already make it difficult enough as is, without having to power your way through five consecutive Qs.

PS: I apologize in advance for lowering the average game score with my all-or-nothing strategy.

I shall keep that in mind if I do another update.