Well, I’m excited– my first mainstream game has gone live on BigBoss’s repo, one of the community sources. So pretty much everyone with installer can see it. As of this writing, there have been 22,436 downloads. Kinda nerve racking… I was nervous enough to send it off to BigBoss for testing, but to think that 20,000 people are finding bugs in my code is a new experience for me. Lexitron is based on TextTwist, a game of finding anagrams hidden within a given set of six letters. There is always at least one word that can be made using all six letters, and this word must be found each round in order to progress to the next round. I used to be quite addicted to TextTwist for the PC, but it has lost popularity in recent years, and seemed pretty unlikely to ever make an appearance on the iPhone.

I’m excited to give back a little to an amazing community, the greatest dev community I’ve been a part of– the DS scene was nothing like this. So a few thousand downloads in and still no donations, but that’s okay… I expect people want to enjoy the game for a few weeks and find out if it’s something they really appreciate or not before donating. If you do appreciate it, though, the star on the left of this page that says ‘donate’ will let you slip me a few bucks.

Some reviews are coming in, I must say people are less critical than I am. Here’s a few I’ve come across so far:

AppleiPhoneSchool.com: “I LOVE this game!! I played it for WAY too long before writing this post!“
Full Review >>

JustAnotherIPhoneBlog.com: “Lexitron is a brilliant new word-making game for the iPhone, that’s a lot like Text Twist. I’ve always been a big fan of Text Twist, and I am thoroughly enjoying Lexitron since installing it earlier tonight - in fact, I’ve been playing it most of the night while watching less-than-mesmerizing TV shows … This is definitely a new favorite for me.“
Full Review>>

iPhoneFreakz.com: “It’s actually really adictive, the only problem i can think of, is that it’s only working with english words .. maybe something for the developer to think about …“ (Don’t worry, I’ve already been contacted by a few folks interested in helping me make some localizations. I hope to be able to release localization-patch packages.)
Full Review >>

WidgetTerminal.com: “This game is very well designed and has lot of options to make the game very interactive.“
Full Review >>

iFonBlog.blogspot.com: “EXCELENTE JUEGO. Si ya conocías TextTwist pues es el mismo juego, pero con opción de jugar horizontal o vertical y alguna más opción.” Ha. Gracias.
Full Review >>

…and the forums are coming back with some nice words as well. A few appreciated quotes:

codeseven on modmyifone.com: “This is such a fun game. When I saw it was like a text twist game, I installed it immediately and I’m so glad I did. This is the coolest game since iZoo!”

reebs on the same: “awesome game…love it!”

iainmann on hackint0sh.org: “Great game…and fantastic for a first mainstream release!!! I’ve been playing it for the past three hours….only stopped to recharge iphone battery!”

and good old BigBoss himself, in an e-mail: “This game’s really awesome. I think it’s the best game out :)”

Aww… such support. What a great community. A few people are having trouble getting Jiggy to work right– aside from that, it seems I may have screwed up the high score system, some people are having trouble with brief game freezes (but the game resumes after a few seconds) and… well I think those are the only bug reports so far. Not bad; I’ll take it. You can bet I’ll patch those up and get some new features going in a future update.