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Show HN: Snack Words - Real-time, Multi-player Word Game for iOS

16 points| metajack | 15 years ago

I just finished my first iOS game, Snack Words, which is a real-time, multi-player word finding game.

iTunes link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/snack-words/id425786167?mt=8&ls=1

YouTube video demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zPQuqoUHqU

I wanted to build something very simple and minimal. There's no figuring out who to play, and each game is only 90 seconds long.

The backend is 2,400 lines (so short!) of Erlang which speaks a custom protocol (length tagged JSON packets) to the client. The Objective-C side protocol implementation makes heavy use of blocks and works a lot like my JavaScript XMPP library.

I hope you like it. Please let me know what you think.

2 comments

[+] tm65atcolumbia|15 years ago|reply

Just downloaded. Very nice! I welcome the minimalist interface. Look forward to your story on the Erlang/XMPP technology decision.

[+] nivertech|15 years ago|reply

Erlang is excellent, but XMPP is bad and ugly, as every other industry standard.

I speaking as somebody involved in scaling ejabberd to huge number of concurrent users and writing XMPP clients in C++.

If you already know Erlang - writing custom Erlang server with lightweight JSON-based protocol over HTTP (comet or long-polling) will beat XMPP servers any day.