We’re very excited here at Centrifuge as we have released our second game – Loose Vowels. Not only is it on Windows 10 but – by popular demand – it’s our first ever game on iOS!
So, where did the idea come from? There are a lot of word games out there and we LOVE them – but we wanted to make something a little bit different from the many Scrabble-type games or word searches out there.
As we are also fans of TV quizzes too, we love the final missing vowels round in Only Connect. Talking to friends and family who watch it we found that it was actually EVERYONE’s favourite part of the show.
That gave us an idea for a quick, casual game where we could make a Daily Puzzle with a theme and then make some much bigger puzzle packs in various categories that people could buy.
So, what we do is have a list of 10 words or phrases on a theme, take out the vowels and move the spaces around a bit. Then all the player has to do is solve the clue. These are the Daily Puzzles – here’s an example:
Deck the Halls
PNC NS
T NSL
GN GR BRD
PPC RN
BL LS
MS TLT
HLLY
CN DYC NS
FRY LG HTS
BB LS
Then for the actual puzzle packs , we made eleven categories, for example Animals, did 25 different topics, for example Poisonous Animals, Books about Animals etc. each with 25 puzzles in them. The first pack is free and the other 10 packs are 79p.
But, for players who don’t want to pay there is a new free Daily Puzzle every day! We thought that would get people coming back to the app everyday – increasing the ad revenue too.
We released it first on Windows 10 – but then lots of people were asking us to bring out an iOS version too so that they could play on their iPads. As we were intending to get Interference out on iOS soon, we thought making a smaller game like Loose Vowels first would give us some practice on iOS before tackling something REALLY big 🙂
Nathan finished the coding on Wednesday 21st December – and we submitted it to Apple at 13.40 that day. We weren’t sure if it would get through certification and into the store before Christmas – as Apple said they were taking a break between 23 -27 December. We kept checking the dashboard to see what was happening, with bated breath. Then at around 19.02 last night (22nd) – we had a message to say that Loose Vowels was in the iTunes store!
Thank-you, Apple – that’s a great Christmas present.