Alphabet Soup – Post
There have been a lot of changes from the original plan. Not necessarily changes that a user can see but changes in implementation from what I had planned. I also still have a lot of changes/additions I’d like to make especially before releasing it to the market, but let’s begin with what it is currently capable of doing. When you load up the main screen, it will access a text file filled with a dictionary of words that will be read in and sorted into a tree for quick access later on. From here you can go into either a Multiplayer or a Play Now setting. If you go to Multiplayer, you will get a blank screen until you push refresh, which will load in user information from a webservice on an external database. This will eventually bring up games you have against those users that you can send back and forth competing against each other. If you go down the path of Play Now it will be a little more interesting as this will bring you to a gameplay screen. Here there is a timer that will keep track of how long it takes you to find the word. You unfortunately can’t drag the letters around (yet) so what you do is click on it and it fills the next open spot to form a word. If you mess up, you can now press the letter you want to remove and it will go back to its place in the bowl. Once you finish the word, if it’s wrong the letters will be placed back into the bowl, you will receive a message, and you can retry. If you get it right, you will be notified and given the time it took you to get it correct. It will then reset the bowl with a new word for you to play again. In the future Play Now will link to a page with multiple different game modes which will then link to this page in the different modes. Multiplayer will also link to this page. I am working on a gesture where if you go around the edge of the bowl, it will ‘stir’ the letters and randomly reorganize them. Also, I am working on incorporating ads and integrating Google Analytics . Not sure if they will be in the final version, but it is good to know how to do them. I also plan to plan to localize into more languages (with updated dictionaries to match this). I’m sure I am missing some of my future plans (some about monetizing with in app purchases), but this is the basic idea of where I’m at and where I plan to go. I would like to claim: Integrating a custom list view, use a remote database, employ a web service, using threading to handle tasks off UI thread.
Home Screen
Multiplayer
Gameplay1
Gameplay2
Gameplay3