14 DAY TRIAL // Windows Phone users rejoice, as Microsoft is about to release a sequel to the highly addictive word puzzle game “Wordament.” The game is called “Snap Attack” and will be available for download beginning May 6.
According to Seattle Times, the game will be exclusively available on Windows Phone platform for several weeks. Android and iOS versions of “Snap Attack” are also in the cards and are expected to arrive later this summer.
Wordament is one of the most addictive word puzzle games on all three major platforms, Windows Phone, Android and iOS, and has been developed by only two people: Jason Cahill and John Thornton.
It appears that Microsoft was so impressed by the work of the two developers that it decided to acquire their company and arrange for a slightly bigger team to work on some kind of sequel to Wordament that will be available exclusively for Windows Phone devices for a certain period.
Well, the new studio now has five employees, so Windows Phone users should expect a much better and more immersive game. In fact, the developers have confirmed that “Snap Attack” is more complex than the predecessor Boggle-like game.
In Snap Attack, players will have to form words in just two and a half minutes. At the end of each session, players are revealed some of the words they could have created with the given letters, as well as their scores on the global leaderboard.
One of the game’s developers claims that Snap Attack has a much bigger potential than Wordament, since there are more players who prefer Scrabble-type of games rather than Boggle.
SnapAttack’s code is about 80% based on Wordament’s, and that includes some of the lexicons taken directly from Microsoft’s Office package.
Thanks to its ownership by Microsoft, the studio was able to take advantage of Microsoft’s cloud computing service and run a pretty complex program that would generate the new game’s boards. According to Jason Cahill, in order to generate one month of puzzles for Snap Attack, it takes about 240 virtual machines on Azure and 22 hours.
On a side note, Windows Phone will be the only platform that Microsoft plans to launch Snap Attack on on May 6. The company has confirmed that the game will be available on Windows Phone 8, 8.1 and Windows 8.1.
Snap Attack will be available for free and will probably be ad-free. Stay tuned for more updates on the game’s availability.