Alpha Pop

[BaronVonMonster]

Hey all!

I'm one half of a small indie game dev team called Monster and Monster and although we mostly create small quirky games for iOS and Android I personally use a Lumia 920. So over the last few months myself and a friend (also a fellow Windows Phone user) have been working on a little game project in our spare time.

It's a short-burst word-hunt game called Alpha Pop and I guess it's kind of a mix between Bejeweled and Wordament...which hopefully makes it quite unique in the world of word based games!?

We released it for free for WP8 & 8.1 last night and it would be great to hear your thoughts and feedback if you give it a go...

Windows Phone Store Link: Alpha Pop | Windows Phone Apps+Games Store (United States)
Website: Alpha Pop



We've already had some great feedback we're currently addressing. Future builds will hopefully address media detection so we can mute the game music if you're listening to your own music or podcasts whilst playing and we hope to make it clearer how to use special blocks when you first encounter them. Oh and we'll also be working on a bunch of other small fixes and game-balance issues over the next few weeks as we gear up to release on Windows 8 App store, iOS and Android to make the most of the cross-platform leaderboards.

Finally it's worth noting that we originally set out to create something pretty simple that we could play on our own phones and that our families could enjoy, we reckon we've managed that If on the off-chance the game proves popular with the rest of the world we do have plenty of things in mind to help expand the game at a later date. For example we'd love to add different game modes to suit different types of players (Action, puzzle and chillout modes?) as well as multi-player.

So yeah, that's about it from me. Thanks for giving this thread a read! If you have any questions or queries about the game or development just give me a shout on this thread and I'll do my best to answer them.

Cheers,

Dave (aka the Art Monster)

 

[Laura Knotek]

Thanks for supporting our platform by developing a new game that looks fun. Good luck with your game.

 

[David P2]

Just had a quick go on it - looks pretty good No issues at all (that I can tell) on my 620 running 8.1

 

[BaronVonMonster]

Thanks Laura! Ahhh and that's alright, we've wanted to make a Windows Phone game for ages now, it's a fantastic platform ;-D

 

[BaronVonMonster]

Fantastic to hear David. We've only a couple of Lumias here to test the game on so it's great to know it's working OK on your device!

 

[David P2]

I don't suppose either of you are Star Wars fans are you.... turns out that "SITH" is an acceptable word. :wink:

 

[BaronVonMonster]

Is it? Amazing! To be honest we've not touched the word list as doing so would open up a massive can of 128,985 worms but there are a few strange words in there....sith being one of them I guess!? Although I do sometimes wonder if the other developer added in a few extra things without me knowing. Hmmm

Oh and if you or any one else is interested we use EOWL - The English Open Word List. We looked at and tried various other word lists that are out there but this one seemed the most suitable to our kind of word game. You can find out more about it here: The English Open Word List

 

[Blacksmith00]

Hey BaronVonMonster, I tried the game, I liked the game! Good luck with it, I'm really looking forward to seeing some cool updates in the future.

 

[BaronVonMonster]

Thanks for the comment! Glad to hear you've been enjoying the game. We certainly have a couple of things lined up as we move forwards. In fact we've already done a lot of behind the scenes work to make the game scale nicely across any resolution / aspect ratio as we head towards releasing a Windows 8 App Store version (our WIP version plays really nice on tablets and touch screen laptops already).

We're also discussing adding a turn based mode to the game for those who don't like the pressure of a timer. In this mode you would have something like 50 turns to rack up a massive score (each word found counts as a turn) with no time-limit on how long you take. It raises a lot of UI / UX issues surrounding our menu flow and high-scores so it might be a bit too much to do at the moment but we reckon it would be a great addition and help the game appeal to an even wider audience.

Again, thanks to everyone on this thread for the kind comments and giving the game a whirl! We'll be sure to keep you posted on how things develop and at some point I'll try to pull together some stats for those interested in how well it has been performing on the app stores etc.