Cassandra.org
Puzzle page screenshot
Game home page
Leaderboard screenshot
Background
Words Across America is a mobile app word game that was derived from the previous webapp game Plates Across America. It represented a distillation of the game concepts and an application of many lessons learned in the four years of developing Plates Across America. It also extended the idea to be not just a word game, but to incorporate a music trivia game as well. The idea is that the puzzles on the license plates can be words or songs depending on the chosen category. I even have most of the data I need to extend this to other categories.
Basic Game Play
The main game play is on the "puzzle page". This shows a license plate with three letters and three numbers which are the "puzzle". Depending on if you can find a solution and how good your answer is, you travel a certain amount of miles (max of 10 miles per puzzle).
You start the game by choosing a category (dictionary or music) and then are presented with ten puzzles which is called a "trip". The answers depend on the category chosen and after ten puzzles, you get a total score that help to put you on the leader-board. For the music category, you can also choose a particular decade sub-category.
The leader-boards track the best scores for each category/sub-category on a daily, weekly and all time basis. At the end of the trip, the game lets you have know achieved either a global best score or a personal best score.
Daily best score icon
Weekly best score icon
All time score icon
Best score icon
Top 5 score icon
Personal best score icon
Global best score icon
Game Trailer
In the previous game, Plates Across America, I eventually paid someone to make a 30 second game trailer. That was well after the game release as I was learning better ways to promote the game. For Words Across America, I created a game trailer before the initial release. Since most of my budget was spent on Plates Across America, I decided I would learn how to make a video trailer myself using Blender. It came out pretty well for a first attempt. The things I did pay for were for the music soundtrack and for a voice actor.
Some trailer screenshots are below, but to see the video itself (on YouTube) visit one of these links (I made a few variations):
Trailer car driving screenshot
Trailer opening screenshot
Trailer puzzle screenshot
Trailer travel the country screenshot
Trailer leaderboard screenshot
Trailer choose ride screenshot
Trailer car profile screenshot
Trailer ending screenshot
Game Screenshots
Game loading screen (mobile)
Access code dialog screenshot
Trip start screenshot
Puzzle page screenshot
Leaderboard screenshot
Profile page screenshot
User Stats Screenshot
Achievements screenshot
Coming soon dialog
Miscellaneous Images
Game vehicle and main icon
Game Favicon
Masked image for mobile app tiles
Early logo with USA map
Black and red logo
White on red logo
Red on black logo
Black and white logo
Membership icon
Free category icon
Logo (square with background)
Meta image for social media sites
Plate collage logo banner
Status
In the first two years since the initial release, we have made very few changes to the game itself. The first years we spent a little money on advertising, but were not getting enough paying members to sustain a marketing budget. In total, over 1,300 people have begun to play the game. But we have only a few dozen that have paid for the game (and it is very, very modestly priced). We have since just let it be and hoped there might be some organic traffic.
The back-end server was originally hosted in AWS and that got expensive. After 18 months we migrated it to Digital Ocean and a simpler architecture and that cut the operating costs by a factor of ten.
Game home page