Word Crasher for iPhone Could Be Headed to iPad! Kevin Ng Gives an Insight Into Developing for iPad.

Posted by Arron Hirst on January 29th, 2010

iPhone App - Designed for iPhone, compatible with iPad

A while ago I gave you the heads up on WordCrasher. Developed by Kevin Ng who has consequentially worked with gaming outfits such as EA and RockStar Games, WordCrasher is Kevin's first debut app for iPhone. Colorful and fast-paced WordCrasher is a letter match-up title which sees you matching letters in any way which suits you. With its various challenging game modes and graphically exciting UI, it's not surprising that the game, having launched, is currently sitting at number 2 in the iTunes UK charts for the gaming category 'Word Games'.

Yesterday though, to my surprise, Kevin dropped me a note that he actually had a full version of WordCrasher up and running on the iPad simulator. He was kind enough to give me some insight into the process of taking WordCrasher from the iPhone to the iPad. Talking to Kevin a little further, he was able to tell me that the physics simulation is up and running at a decent speed, and that the game is responding to the touch events. He has not tried hooking up the sound yet, however, but he explains that basically it is possible to play a game of WordCrasher natively on the iPad, (albeit through the simulator).

There were not too many changes necessary to make the game work on iPad due to similarities in the SDK (iPad runs iPhone OS 3.2), but the real work will be making iPad WordCrasher a stand-alone game which takes advantage of the format, rather than just a straight port. Using the iPad simulator, a lot of work can be started in creating high fidelity graphics for the big screen, but many of the UI and gameplay decisions will have to be held back until I can get my hands on the hardware itself. There are other issues to consider too though, such as whether OpenFeint will step forward and support the iPad, which is in my opinion likely, but I haven’t heard anything from them.

If not, I'll have to re-code the online scoreboard and social networking features. This morning, I cut out a scale model of the iPad to test some theories about the UI, ergonomics and gameplay - how the player would hold it whilst playing, and whether this would be comfortable, and it looks like WordCrasher will work well on the iPad. This is very different from running on the simulator, as you are working with a mouse instead of your hand, and an upright screen instead of something handheld.

Kevin stresses though that although he does have WordCrasher up and running on the iPad simulator included in the recently released iPhone OS 3.2 SDK beta, he won't be releasing the game on the iPad unless it makes for a compelling game on the device. As expected, Kevin was also quick to say that WordCrasher will still work on the iPad out of the box as it stands now, however in his words: