Scrivalry: the largest MMO word game ever made

Hi everyone,

I'd like to show everyone what we've been working on for the past year.

The game is called Scrivalry and it is an MMO word game in which potentially thousands of players play our variant of Scrabble/Wordfeud agains each other at the same time.
The game world is gigantic. Right it is about 4 billion tiles big (or 19 million Scrabble boards), but we are planning to make it at least 10 times bigger. All players play on the same board in real time rather than taking turns.

We have some footage to give an impression of the scale of the game:

For more information you can visit our www.scrivalry.net

We will hopefully be releasing the game by the end of the year. If anyone is interested in helping us with testing, you let us know on our website or send me a PM with your email address.

 

It took you a year to make that?

You say the game board is gigantic, but for multiplayer games you Need the players to play close to each other (otherwise it's more of a single player game) and since the players will probably play in short sessions you would be better off making a smaller map that has some mechanics for refreshing itself (so that the solved parts would be available again, but with slightly different look after each refresh cycle)

 

That's a cool idea! Especially with persistent levels and some sort of global leaderboard, I think word game fanatics could get really addicted to it and play for hours on end. Good luck!

 

It kind of reminds me of a giant bananagrams game, which is a lot of fun and speed is an important factor. Which makes me think maybe your tournament rules don't really take advantage of your game format and giant board. Maybe the tournament should last x hours with unlimited turns instead of x turns?

 

We tried using a timer instead of turns, but the problem is that it becomes hard to measure skill. The person who plays the most wins then. We have a global leaderboard for that. When we tried using turns we found that that really made it about finding the right place to play your best word your letters allowed. Also, we suspect that our target audience does not like being on a timer. I'll check out bananagrams.

We are planning to add a feature that will make it all about speed though, but that won't be until after release.

 

Some gameplay footage:

 

This looks fun, and it's a really neat idea.

 

I LOVE your game! I look forward to when I can play it in German and in English at the same time - if that is going to come out in the future. I just wish the app wasn't taken down in the USA store. My friend did not download it when I asked him too (when it was in appsgonefree) and now it isn't available at all. However....there are many many words that is missing in your app - or, they are not words in British English. I am not sure which. Footbar, foobar being two of them. But I kept finding "bingos" that were considered invalid in your app, but I didn't keep a list because your app is still way better than Words with Monsters (lacked way too may words) or Words with Friends (Too frustrating to wait for the other player to finally, get around to playing.).
Thanks for all the good work!

By the way, I love the idea that I can just play immediately and not have all these stressers of playing against someone else, like other games have. The whole idea that I might get my spot taken by someone else I can handle though. Its fun!

 

Hi VelvelaJade,

I am glad you are liking the game.
We had some issues with our servers, but they are fixed now. The app is still free to download. If you find any words that are supposed to be in the dictionary, you can post on our forums and we will add them. We are maintaining our dictionary ourselves and over time it should get better.