WordRoom

This app was a candidate in the Apptivate.MS semi-finals. See how it did among the other candidates in the Games group.

Description

Tired of waiting for 72 hours to beat your friend with your awesome knowledge in assorted words? WordRoom is the game where you'll settle things in a minute or two. You'll meet your opponent in real time, add friends or play random matches against anyone in the world. If you don't feel social, play the single-player mode with fixed levels and an industry standard three-star-point-system. You can also practice with your very own personal trainer "Mr Bot" that will adapt to your skill and offer tough resistance no matter how good you get.

Features

• Single-player with fixed levels and three difficulty settings. Get those stars! New levels are added from time to time.
• Multiplayer with random generated levels. Play against your friends or spend you time practicing with your very own personal trainer "Mr Bot".
• Two game modes, "Turn Based-mode" for some extra thinking time (about 20 seconds and less for each turn) or the action filled Blitz-mode where the first to find words gets the points

Videos

Screenshots

Comments

Salchi13 Dec 18 '12 at 23:37

But, you started developing this app way before the contest, didn't you?

RobCurr Dec 18 '12 at 4:57

Good luck guys. I am rooting for you to win from the games area. Original idea. Great metro UI/windows 8 features. A quality app.

AnkMannen Dec 18 '12 at 5:41

Thanks! There's a lot of good apps left though. I'm happy that we made it this far!

Logan Alan Nowak Dec 17 '12 at 12:39

Great work, you did well 😃

AnkMannen Dec 17 '12 at 12:41

Thanks! I'm a Little bit surprised at the moment. :)

RobCurr Dec 11 '12 at 17:32

Played your game last night and thought it was definitely a clever innovation on other word-based games. I personally sucked at finding the words. I found the suggestions to be a bit incessant because I really did want to find the words myself and it never gave me quite enough opportunity to do that. Also, you may want to prevent the hints from happening when the player is selecting a word, it was distracting. I never ventured to try the competitive mode because it seemed I was so horrible at finding the words in time. Might reduce the difficulty at first to build confidence.

AnkMannen Dec 11 '12 at 20:01

Thanks for the comments! Did you try changing the settings on the far left of the single player start screen. You have easy, normal and hard mode to change between, giving you different levels of help. Or are you suggesting a new mode where you have the words in the list on the right but no suggestions? We could definitly do that!

AnkMannen Dec 11 '12 at 20:34

And also, to answer you last suggestion, we are finetuning the personal trainer to be a little more forgiving in the beginning. It is a self learning bot that adapts to your gameplay simulating a multiplayer game on auto generated levels. I hope this gives you some answers on you comments, we really appreciate your feedback!

RobCurr Dec 11 '12 at 20:49

Ok, I didn't realize the difficulty would be reflected in the amount of help given, I thought it was simply the complexity of the puzzle. Being able to turn off the hints would be a nice easy feature though.

AnkMannen Dec 11 '12 at 20:54

The puzzles stay the same, it's so hard to make different complexity since english is not my native language. I'm looking for people to help me out in creating both wordlists and puzzles. Wordlists being the most important since we often auto generate the levels from that.

RobCurr Dec 11 '12 at 21:02

What you could do is create a heuristic that would grade the auto-generated puzzles for complexity. Ones that contain a high degree of non-linearity for the word(letters are more scattered) are graded as higher difficulty. Add that to a grading for the average word length of the words in the puzzle and you have a reasonable approximation of difficulty.

AnkMannen Dec 11 '12 at 21:07

Sweet! I'm definitly gonna give that a try and give you credit for the idea! That is actually gonna fit quite nice into the current algorithm! love new ideas

Logan Alan Nowak Dec 10 '12 at 22:19

A very worthy semi-finalist, good luck, friend.

AnkMannen Dec 11 '12 at 4:07

Thank you! It's a long wait now. Don't you think? :D

Logan Alan Nowak Dec 11 '12 at 8:39

Longer for some than others. Mine doesn't feel like it should be in the semi-finals, yours has a good chance of winning first.

AnkMannen Dec 11 '12 at 10:23

Thank you for those kind words!

Knu Dec 10 '12 at 16:12

"BY PREMIUM" :)

AnkMannen Dec 10 '12 at 16:52

I know, there is a fix including some other stuff on the way. I know it looks pretty stupid. :)

AnkMannen Dec 10 '12 at 16:59

It's already fixed in the store version it seems. Had to check. :) Only screenshots and video that's a couple of weeks older.

gbs Dec 6 '12 at 5:12

Interesting game.

AnkMannen Dec 6 '12 at 20:25

Thank you! Good to hear! Don't hesitate to give us feedback!

Sandeep V Dec 5 '12 at 11:37

Quite interesting, good job :)

AnkMannen Dec 6 '12 at 20:25

Thanks! Please tell us if there is something we should change or work on!

John Haugeland Nov 27 '12 at 22:28

Yay, competitive games! Upvoted. :)

AnkMannen Nov 28 '12 at 10:34

Thank you for the upvote! :)

KevinM1 Nov 17 '12 at 20:52

Competitive word search is an interesting idea. Do any of the words go diagonally?

AnkMannen Nov 19 '12 at 7:37

They can go anyway they want. Over spaces and diagonally. Watch the gameplay video to get an idea of how it works. The words often interlock so you need to take them in a certain order (not always). In multiplayer mode the levels are auto generated for each match. So there is not telling how it will be layed out. But they are always solvable of course!

mvark Nov 16 '12 at 10:00

Looks interesting. Is this built with C#/XAML? How are you managing the back-end? A few minor suggestions - 1) Consider reducing the age for the Age Rating to 7+ 2) Correct the spelling issues in the Description in the App page

AnkMannen Nov 16 '12 at 11:55

Thanks for you comment! Yes, it's built in C#/XAML. Back-end is Windows Azure. We'll fix the spelling issues.

AnkMannen Nov 16 '12 at 15:26

Hi again! I looked at the rules for lowering the Age Rating. Since we have a chat in the game we cannot go any lower. I also verified this with Microsoft.