Who We Are

 

We are two software developers with full time jobs working on projects for other people, with the desire to create something great that would allow us to support ourselves. Our first projects together began in college in 2002, where we tinkered with the Unreal Engine in game development courses. In the time since, we've worked together off and on at a variety of companies building B2B applications while making several attempts in our off-hours to independently create a mobile game that we thought would be fun to play, but the ideas behind them failed to create the enjoyment factor that would push us to see them through to completion.

As gamers, we want to make games that we want to play. If we aren't enamored with their game play, why would anyone else want to play it at all?

 

Finally, in the spring of 2015 we had the idea for Word Tycoon. There were so many word games out there that all repeated the same formulas - Scrabble-like, and Boggle-like. People loved them, but neither ever felt like they were really valuing the "words" part of the "word game genre". The value was put in words like QI and ZA, or stacking CATS in between two other words so you could score 5 ways. Real vocabularies mean very little in other word games.

Word Tycoon Offers Something Different

 

With a focus on selling longer words we began prototyping out the game play - tossing out the ideas that didn't work; refining the ideas that did. Iteration after iteration it became something we really believed in. Conversations with others helped refine our ideas and continued to reaffirm the notion that people wanted a word game that really valued words. We framed the game play in the context of strategic investments like trading stocks or flipping houses. Over the course of the game you buy letters, reform them in to words, and then sell them back with the intention of making money. Scoring and bonuses help to reinforce selling longer words, while leader boards help drive competition between players to see who will become the best Word Tycoon.

Where We're Headed

 

Word Tycoon is still in its infancy and there is a lot of work to be done. Future features include a campaign mode that will provide players with progressively harder objectives to accomplish, achievements and unlockables to enhance your profile, more ways to compare your Tycoon-ability to other players through friendly challenges, and insight in to your past performance to show you opportunities to improve.

 

Beyond this game, we have ideas for others that we are beginning to explore to decide if they have merit, as well as ideas for a few utility apps that we think address common problems in unique ways in the same way that Word Tycoon aims to think outside of the box for the word game genre.