Letterpress by Loren Brichter of Atebits | Hacker News Reader

Letterpress by Loren Brichter of Atebits

atebits.com

51 pointstuhin25 comments

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.

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.

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...)

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...

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

Loren should do relatively well out of this game though.

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.

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)

I 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.

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

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 while.

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.

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.

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.

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