"Crosswords/Downwords": The perfect word game?

Well, here it is... the actual press release that we eventually sent out:

Sly Fox Productions Pty Ltd today releases Crosswords / Downwords 1.2 for iOS. Combining crosswords, anagrams and acrostics together in one neat package, Crosswords / Downwords is a true “word square” game where letters are arranged into a square to form words both across and down. It features a comprehensive hints-and-cheats system, a built-in dictionary, puzzles with multiple solutions. It is a game that can be enjoyed by young children, yet still challenge any Scrabble champion.

Menangle, NSW, Australia – They live in the Australian bush and call themselves “Sly Fox Productions”. She trains horses. He builds apps. “To tell the truth, Lee’s not much good around the farm”, Frances confides, “so I encourage him to make himself useful elsewhere. Writing iPhone applications seemed an obvious choice.” Some kind of puzzle, she suggested, but no arithmetic. He set out to create the ultimate word game.

Lee trawled through the history of word games, looking for inspiration – crosswords, anagrams, acrostics – until he found his ideal puzzle. Perhaps the oldest of them all, the “word square” – letters arranged into a square to form words both across and down. Combining crosswords, anagrams and acrostics together in one neat package. They have been around for thousands of years, have even been pulled from the ruins of ancient Pompeii. So perfect that they were once believed to have mystical powers.

Lee made his own, less profound, discovery… word squares are fun! “It’s like trying to untangle six interlocking anagrams all at once!”, he says. “Crosswords seem lazy by comparison – there’s all those gaps, and the words only intersect here and there. In a word square, every single letter is an intersection. Every letter counts!”

When he took the first puzzle to Frances, it was too hard. She couldn’t do it. Neither could Lee: “It took me hours to solve. I couldn’t believe that a tiny 3×3 square – just nine letters – could be so difficult.” “I was hopeless in the beginning”, admits Frances, “but I am improving.”

And that is where the real work started. They tried and discarded many ideas, spent hundreds of hours play-testing. The result? “Crosswords/Downwords”, with a comprehensive hints-and-cheats system, a built-in dictionary, and puzzles with multiple solutions. A game that can be enjoyed by young children, yet still challenge any Scrabble champion.

The perfect word game? “I don’t know about perfect”, says Frances, “but it’s pretty clever.”

Device Requirements:
* iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad
* Requires iOS 3.0 or later
* 6.1 MB

Pricing and Availability:
Crosswords / Downwords 1.2 is only $0.99 USD (or equivalent amount in other currencies) and available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Games category.

Crosswords / Downwords 1.2
Purchase and Download
Screenshot
App Icon

Lee and Frances Borkman are Sly Fox Productions Pty Ltd, a family business creating quality iPhone games and tools. They work from their small horse property below the Southern Highlands in rural New South Wales. Copyright (C) 2010 Sly Fox Productions Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone, iPod and iPad are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.

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Odd Couple from the Outback turns Ancient Word Game into iPhone Classic

Trying to find a newsworthy angle to push in first press release for Crosswords/Downwords...


ODD COUPLE FROM OUTBACK TURNS ANCIENT WORD GAME INTO IPHONE CLASSIC

They live in the Australian bush and call themselves "Sly Fox Productions". She trains horses. He plays with computers. "To tell the truth, Lee's not much good around the farm", Frances confides, "so he has to make himself useful in other ways. Writing iPhone applications seems an obvious choice."

The game itself is a variation on the "word square". They have been around for thousands of years - letters arranged into a square, so that words are formed across and down simultaneously. These squares have been found beneath the volcanic ash that buried ancient Pompeii, and were once believed to have strange powers. Lee made his own, less profound, discovery... word squares are fun!

Imagine that you are confronted with a word square, three letters across by three letters down, in which all the letters have been shuffled about... can you uncover the hidden word square? Can you rearrange the letters so that every row and every column of letters makes a word... *simultaneously*? This is the basis of the game that Lee and Frances created. It combines elements of crosswords and anagrams, but also involves the spatial manipulation of a Rubik's Cube or classic sliding puzzle.

"It's like trying to untangle six interlocking anagrams all at once!", says Lee. "When I showed the first puzzle to Frances, she couldn't do it, and neither could I. It was the only one I had, and there were no clues. It took me hours to solve. I couldn't believe that a tiny 3x3 square - just nine letters - could be so difficult."

"I was hopeless at them in the beginning", admits Frances, "but I am improving. We realised pretty quickly that solving a 3x3 word square with no clues is a task for advanced word puzzlers, so our goal was to make that basic word square puzzle accessible to everyone, from young children to adult experts. We solved the problem of providing clues, but then we ran into the more fundamental problem with any word game - the *vocabulary*. We want people to able to play this game even if they have never heard of the word KEA or LOY, but we also want to give something meaty to all those Scrabble champions out there."

After much experimentation, Lee found the answer - allow *multiple* solutions. A carefully designed puzzle could have a simple solution, with elementary vocabulary, but also allow *other* solutions, involving more obscure words. So the puzzle can be solved by young kids, while advanced players with richer vocabularies, have more solutions available to them. "It's pretty clever", says Frances.

...

Press release thoughts, Part One.

Well here we are, with an app that took nine months of late late nights in our kitchen to create - something we are very proud of - and we really want to give it a good chance out there among the great mass of stuff. Most of all, we just want it to be seen, because we know that there are people out there who will want to play it as soon as they see it. It is after all, a very classy little word game. (Go and grab the free version now, why doncha? There's an ad for it somewhere on this page.)

So, here is our problem... a great little app with 4.5 stars average rating in the App Store, but it's drowning in an ocean of apps. The work is not completed just because the app is written and published - it needs a little bit of selling, a little bit of publicity.

We hear that a press release is important in persuading journalists, reviewers, and bloggers to take a look at our app, and then to mention it to their thousands of readers. There's a popular service that will personally hand-deliver our press release to a gazillion journalists, together with half a dozen red roses each, for just a few dollars, and we are keen to leap in...

But first we have to write the darned thing. And this is proving difficult. In fact, we have been dithering about it for weeks now. You see, a press release has to do more than spruik an app - it has to pitch a story. Yet where is the story? This is a great little app, a refined and elegant word puzzle. Yes, yes, it deserves a place among the iPhone's very finest word games. But that, friends, is not much of a story.

I have some ideas, but first... bed.

More in the morning.

Lee

Sly Fox

Sly Fox is not my real name

Honestly.

It's not.

My real name is "Lee Borkman", which is not so catchy, though still a name to be proud of. I have a bit of history, out there in the world, doing interesting things. I've played with major rock bands, sung with the Australian Opera Company, won University Medals and academic awards, been president of the Montessori Association of Australia. I have even been quoted alongside Bertrand Russell on philosophy, and Richard Dawkins on memetics. But that was all, I must admit, *many* years ago. For the last decade and more, I have worked in your basic office, in your basic Government department, doing nothing very exciting. Sure, I've dabbled in online communities - was briefly prominent in an obscure sub-field of web application development - but really I have just been getting on with mundane matters, helping raise four kids, and letting the world pass me by.

So now here I am, trying something a little different. It sounds unimpressive and commonplace, but yes, I've been writing iPhone apps. Sitting at my kitchen table, here in rural Australia, among the snakes, the wallabies and the kids, trying to take some strain off the family finances. I do enjoy this kind of thing, and now, what is more, a creation of mine has gone out into the world and is sending back a little bit of money every week, helping us make ends meet. And Hallelujah!- there are people out there in the world - a few thousand, at last count - who are actually playing the little game that I wrote. I'd like *more* people to play it, of course, and I'd be very happy if money started coming in a little faster, but I'm not comfortable playing the salesman, and that is largely that.

And that's probably the initial impetus behind this new blog - it gives me a place to put a prominent ad for my game - that's it up there, at the top on the right - but I'm going to try and add a little value, try to say something worth reading - something about my travails in writing and publishing games as an independent developer, about life in my kitchen; much of things I admire and less of things that I don't.

I've had help in all of this, of course - while I do all the design and coding, Francesca does all the hard stuff, and the *two* of us are really Sly Fox. But yes, what about that name? It comes from that scrawled fox face at the top of the page, the silly little drawing that has become something of a signature for me. I have doodled thousands of them over the years, and no doubt there are many thousands yet to come. A comforting, and sobering, thought.

More coming soon,
See you then,
Lee
Sly Fox