Scrabble GO

Play the classic Scrabble game you know and love! With the official board, tiles, and Scrabble word dictionaries, only Scrabble GO delivers the authentic crossword game experience.

Scopely, one of the leading game publishers in the world hired American company Pierplay to make an official adaptation of Scrabble. Pierplay in turn contacted Playsoft to contract a team of developers. Later on Scopely got more directly involved in production and our team began working more closely with the Barcelona team.

Initially our agile team was focused on development of additional Scrabble-related arcade minigames. Later on we moved to working no all the other areas of the game, both on client and backend.

I was the agile team lead, responsible for estimations, assigning tasks, reporting and general cooperation with the producer from the Scopely side.

On the tech side, game client was built in Unity and server logic in .NET, with a thin client architecture. Despite that, it was mostly Unity part that ate most of development time. Client was built using a custom in-house MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) framework.

While on paper this solution should allow UI/UX designers work in separation from programmers removing bottlenecks from the workflow, the actual workflow and team build didn't really reflect it, with artists and designers working mainly on mockups and developers doing actual UI implementation. As a result developers ended up doing all the work required by MVVM twice, such as preparing both observables and observers for our own use. On top of that solution itself was very buggy and was in a constant state of major rewrites, introducing completely new issues to already signed off areas of the game. Using MVVM approach also ignores the fact that Unity itself already duplicates some of its princicples, such as using Unity UI engine as a view model.

We worked on Scrabble GO for two years.

You can download and play "Scrabble GO" for Android and iOS directly from Google Play Store and App Store.