Thanks to all of you who made “Got Game?” our best App Hack yet. We had a ton of entries, which made judging a challenge, but also a blast! We saw imaginative designs and control concepts, some great kids apps, and a few nicely rendered game clones. The winner, by a whisker, is…
Color Tangle by Will Hankinson
Just what you wanted—another puzzle game to steal hours out of your life, right? Well, Will has brought his popular game Color Tangle to webOS. In this game, you must untangle pairs of balls attached by strings. As each pair is untangled, it disappears. When you’ve cleared the balls, you win the level. The catch is that not all colors of strings allow all colors of balls through. It is thoroughly addicting, with a simple, cheerful design.
BTW, it looks like he’s using Haxe NME as his development tool of choice, which is definitely worth a look if you like to do cross-platform games the easy way. Thanks, Will! We’ll be in touch about your new TouchPad.
Honorable Mentions
Quad Word by David Whittaker
As a word guy, I love word games, and Quad Word is quite a challenge. From each of four quadrants, grab a single letter and drag it to the center, forming a word. You can grab multiple letters at a time for speedier results and a higher score. It’s a real trick to sort out a word from all the possible combinations. And if your letters spell more than one word, you’ll get an extra point for each word.
Shooty by Erik Weitnauer
A nice tribute to Space Invaders. We love the hand-drawn design of this little gem. Erik adds one great feature (although we found it inconsistent in real-world use) by providing an optional separate app for your webOS phone to control the game. Erik makes use of node.js, built into webOS since version 2.0. Great concept, Erik!
Powfish for webOS phones by Oli Coombs
Oli wanted to create a puzzle game that combined the best of games like Tetris and Bejeweled. We think you’ll like his final result. There’s also a version for the TouchPad, though it’s not full-screen.
Other notables
If you have small kids you need to keep occupied, check out two additions to the Make a Scene series, Safari and Under the Sea.
LowDef Invaders brings back fond memories for me, because it’s the first game I cloned as a young developer. It’s hard to beat these retro games!
Once again, thanks for making this a very challenging App Hack to judge!
Thanks Fred and all the wonderful peeps at webOS Developer Relations. I’m working on some great enhancements to QuadWord and another game too. Unfortunately, my day job keeps me very busy so I don’t have as much time as I’d like to bring all these ideas in my head to life. Thanks again for the recognition.