Saturday, March 17, 2018

...adverb, 17 letters: to do something in a manner of little importance

I had the pleasure of working at Zynga with the Word Streak With Friends team starting in late 2016, including the release of Boggle With Friends in March of 2017, and post-launch support. The whole experience for me was a crash course in mobile game live operations, and allowed me to participate in new feature design, as well as to stretch my creativity with the game's Daily Challenge feature.

I was delighted to contribute to the success of Boggle With Friends, and reveled in the serendipity of the opportunity, owing to my love of word games like Yahoo! Word Racer. By far, my favorite aspect of the project was the Daily Challenge feature, and over the course of about a year, I created more than 350 unique puzzles, padded the feature with a handful of new puzzle types, and monitored the difficulty and completion rates by our Players.

The Daily Challenge feature from Word Streak With Friends had 6 unique puzzle types - Specific Tiles, Same Score Words, Super Juicy, Increasing Time, Riddle and Themed Puzzles - only the last two types required special construction of the puzzle in order to capture the answer to the Riddle, or specific keywords in Themed Puzzles. Here's an example:  What do you have when you snap your fingers twice every second? RHYTHM!

I worked with the development team to create five additional puzzle types - Corner Triples, Double Doubles, Thousand Words, Word Search, and Definition - the last two being similar 'keyword' types to Riddle and Themed Puzzles.
The "Thousand Words" was an attempt to offer puzzles with a vast number of words; typically, a good Daily Challenge puzzle would contain 300 or more words. The grid pictured was a letter sequence I found online that generated over 1,000 words!


The "Definition" type was a straightforward puzzle where the Player would be given the word definition and the number of letters. There were some doubts from the development team 
about some of the puzzles I made, but I think, overall, my work on Boggle With Friends was very CONSEQUENTIAL.







1 comment:

Unknown said...

I've not been able to play the Daily Event for at least 3 months. It has not worked. What can be done on my end? I miss playing it!