Crossword Dungeon is now available on Google Play for Android devices!

Version 1.1.3 (which has enough changes in it to have been 1.2) is also up on the iOS App Store. It’s worth noting this update fixes that nasty intermittent bug that would crash your game and ruin your saves!

I’ve just submitted for review version 1.1.3 of Crossword Dungeon to the iOS App Store as well as begun preparing the entry to the Google Play store for its first Android release!

The price will increase to $3.99 with this update, so if you’ve been putting off grabbing it on iOS, you’ve got a few days to grab it at its current, low price of $2.99.

The following is the list of changes that made it into this version:

These past couple of months have been turbulent on account of pushing Super Monkey Ball Bounce out the door at Three Rings/SEGA. Motivation and mental resources to work on my own projects have taken a hit, and as I’ve begun to regain momentum I’ve also put quite a bit of thought into shifting priorities:

As I prepare Crossword Dungeon to be released on PC, I will continue to release incremental content updates and bugfixes in the fashion of v1.1.1. This next version, 1.1.2, which has just been submitted to the App Store for review, includes:

The latest Crossword Dungeon version, 1.1.1, is now available on the App Store.

Version 1.1.1 brings a few bug fixes, a major XP tweak, over 100 new words, and, most importantly, the ability to win the game by completing dungeon level 40! Should you have a character deeper than dungeon level 40, the game will be won upon the next level’s descent.

I am happy to announce the latest and greatest update to Crossword Dungeon, version 1.1, is now available for iPhone and iPad on the App Store! A thorough list of changes can be found here. Reviews and ratings, as always, are greatly appreciated!

The long-in-coming 1.1 update to Crossword Dungeon is currently in the works. The main focus of this update is to bring the game to iPad with Universal support, as well as adding 200+ more words, fixing bugs, improving performance, and tweaking the balance.

Since Cocos2d iPhone’s OpenGL is only capable of repeating textures that have dimensions which are a power of two, I’ve put together a quick-and-dirty algorithm to tile arbitrarily-sized sprites to arbitrary sizes. TiledSprite takes a source sprite with a texture from a file or a subtexture from an atlas, and clips and/or tiles to fit the requested width and height. The source code is available on GitHub as a Gist, just copy-paste it, download it, or clone the repo and grab the .h and .m for use in your project.

I’ve codenamed my current project “Adventurers“, which, although somewhat telling of its theme, should give little away of its mechanics. Needless to say, adventurers will be involved, and there will be adventuring. It’s being developed in Objective-C and Cocos2d 2.0 for iOS, with iPad support from the get-go.

Crossword Dungeon update 1.0.1 is now live at the App Store. The changes for this version are listed below the update, as well as in the prior post. If you have been waiting to buy the game until after more content was added and the major bugs were resolved, I welcome you to try it now!

Developing and releasing Crossword Dungeon has been an amazing learning experience. Mobile, iOS, Objective C, Cocos2d, and a solo commercial release were all personal firsts, and releasing within a fairly tight window (for personal and motivation reasons) meant a good number of items slipped by untested. Update 1.0.1 has been submitted to the App Store for review, and contains the following changes:

Here’s something you’re likely to have run across: the player character is in the center of the screen, and you want it to move in the cardinal direction you click, relative to its position—clicking above it moves north, below south, to the right east, and to the left west.

I’ve implemented this control scheme in my current project, settling on the following technique after a less-than-elegant implementation relying heavily on if-elses: