My favorite game of late is Letterpress. It’s a wonderful iPhone game which combines Scrabble-esque word play with territory capture, ala Risk. It’s an instant classic, one I’d love to play with my grandmother.
What a shame, then, that Letterpress is iOS only, and doesn’t support local play.
For kicks, today I challenged myself to make a local Letterpress clone in one day. Bonus points: I wanted it to be playable on the iPad, so I could set it down in front of my grandmother.
Three and a half hours later…
Here it is! A complete two player local clone of Letterpress, up on my webspace.
I’ll leave this up until the inevitable cease and desist letter, and then, with great respect to atebits and his awesome game, I’ll take down my version.
This turned out to be a really simple project, and might serve as a good introduction to game programming. It’s just javascript and an html canvas element (ie, thingy which allows you to draw images on x and y coordinates).
For those who are interested, here’s the entire project source code and resources, released under the Crapl License (that is, open source, with the understanding that the source code is a quick hack).
If enough people are interested, I’ll make a tutorial out of this. It’s definitely, honestly a beginner level project, with enough guidance.
Oh, but my bonus goal? The iPad? Don’t even try it. It loads a large dictionary file. iPad Safari segfaults every time I try to visit the site. Sigh 🙂
Let me know what you think!