Team17: Your Game Could Be an App Store Hit with One Small Change | Hacker News Reader

Team17: Your Game Could Be an App Store Hit with One Small Change

carrypad.com

47 pointsmikecane12 comments

How that article got by without pitching naming the feature "Worms With Friends" is a mystery of the ages.

Agreed. Was I the only one that interpreted the title as meaning, Team17 will teach you one small change that can make YOUR game a hit?

No. The use of a colon instead of a comma probably added to the confusion.

I certainly would have benefitted from the title being prefixed with "Dear Team17," or "An open letter to Team 17"

In the casual/social gaming world we call this asynchronous play. You won't find a single breakout hit in the space that requires synchronous play (like Worms). It's extremely rare to find groups of ones own friends online at the same time, who want to play a game with you, outside of the core gamer sect.

Carcassonne (http://carcassonneapp.com/) provides exactly this play-by-mail feature (though it uses iOS push notifications to inform the players). It's really fun if you like being distracted the whole day long.

Play by mail is just a term for multiplayer turn notification. Words with friends also uses push notifications if enabled, and if I recall from the early days, they (Words and Chess with friends) would send either a Text or Email message to inform players of their turn before iOS3.

I disagree to a point. One key part of a worms match is to be able to make your move in a fixed amount of time. Playing in a scenario like WWF, it could easily take that time just to reacquaint myself with where everyone is.

It is true that it would change the game dynamics, this is also true for Scrabble and Chess, which are normally played with a clock (however formally or informally applied)

That can improve the game though, while I'm not necessarily that interested in improving my Worms Skillz, correspondence chess definitely gives me a form of training that comes in handy when playing over the board

I would think it would take more than "one small change" to get this added. Never as easy as it seems.

Author of the story here:

I know I bend the truth a bit with the "one small change part" but I did mention that it would be "one small change" from the player perspective, but probably a decent amount of work for the developers : P. All I was trying to imply was that the game is already designed to be turne-based and that doing asynchronous play wouldn't alter the gameplay very much.

...or replace the worms with birds and call it "Birds".

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