a pass-and-play party game for iPhone and Android
Series · 2 parts
Halfword is the word game Undercover for one phone passed round the table. It started as the version of the game I wanted: better looking than the app we used to play with, with no ads, and one day with word pairs that are generated, not picked from a list. It grew into a game in six languages, drawn in sixteen colours.
This series follows it from the first spec to the App Store and on to Android, one problem at a time.
Halfword is the word game Undercover for one phone passed round the table: pixel art, eight special roles, and points that add up over a whole evening. It is out for iPhone and Android. Here is what building it took: points balanced by simulation, one Swift codebase for two platforms, an engine that can replay any game, pixel art without image files, and screens drawn before they were coded.
The Android emulator and a pile of Gradle builds took my Mac down with them, so Halfword’s Android screens are drawn on the JVM instead: Robolectric starts the real app, Roborazzi saves the pictures, 456 of them in four languages in 2 minutes 19 seconds. How it works, what it caught, and what it can’t tell you.
