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Word Scourge
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Asynchronous Multiplayer
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Tiles fall into a shared grid. Longer words score more. Rare letters score more. Chain multiple words in a round for streak multipliers.
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Track Stats
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Up to 6-Player Games
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3-Round Games
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More Flair! Choose Your Avatar.
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Available in Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store
Inspiration
I have always been a fan of asynchronous multiplayer games like Words with Friends. It's a low-stress way to play with friends such that you don't all need to be available at the same time. Years ago I worked out a client-server architecture for developing this type of game and I fully coded the server as a REST server and the client in Unity. I was never really happy with the client so that code was zipped up and archived for years. I recently got the ambition to re-write the client in React Native which was a better choice for a word game (Unity was overkill).
What it does
Tiles fall into a shared grid. Chain adjacent letters to form words before tiles decay. Longer words score more. Rare letters score more. Chain multiple words in a round for streak multipliers. Multiplayer, is where things really get fun. Each game consists of 3 rounds. Rounds progress after each player has completed their round. All players get the exact same letter drops per round so there is no luck involved. Winning or losing relies solely on skill.
How we built it
The server side is a REST server written in PHP and backed with a MySQL database. The architecture of the REST API is such that a single server could host the back end for multiple apps. Currently there is only this first game, Word Scourge, but if I had an idea for another asynchronous multiplayer game, only the game-specific layer would have to be written. The client is a straight-up Reactive Native client which allows deployment on both Android and iOS.
Challenges we ran into
As with most multiplayer games, my biggest worry was allowing the server architecture to scale easily to handle growing traffic and to minimize abuse. Since both, if not handled well, can cost real money (hosting costs, etc.).
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I'm really proud of the server design. I feel like the effort I put into making it secure and scalable paid off.
What we learned
I learned that Unity is a good choice for a more traditional game (high speed animation, 3D, etc), it was a poor choice for a word game. Rewriting the client in React Native was the correct choice.
What's next for Word Scourge
I'd love for it to be successful enough to allow me to continue enhancing it!
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