What is it about games that intrigues us so much? Is it competition? Perhaps it is its impact on brain plasticity. When I started playing Wordle a few years ago, I thought maybe I was getting a little smarter every day. Not by much, but then I added Quordle, Connections, and most recently Strands. When they don't bother me to the point of wanting to throw my phone against the wall, I like these games. Maybe that's why I downloaded it immediately and started playing. The New York Times' The newest game, Crossplay.
However, from the beginning I could see that this was a different beast and, as I progressed through the rules of the game and in my first round against the built-in computer, I asked myself why Crossplay is an application and how The New York Times explains the game's “Scrabble” vibes.
Making a game
While Petriello isn't coding the games, his responsibilities run wide and deep. “My job is to distribute the game,” he explained, which, by his account, sounds a bit like herding cats. Petriello keeps an eye on feature backlog and ensures features align with engineering capabilities. He also works with product designers.
“I've heard a definition of game producers as lineup designers, and I really agree with that,” he said.
Crossplay, however, was different. First of all, unlike Wordle or Strands, it is a standalone application. Wordle and Connections are basically built as web applications that can be played online or within the container. The New York Times Gaming application.
Crossplay, on the other hand, “is the first standalone app that The New York Times games the team has done outside The New York Times gaming app. “From a scale perspective, it's much bigger than releasing a new puzzle that appears in the game app,” Petriello said.
On the iPhone, where I played, Crossplay is a native iOS app built in Swift, but it's also on Android.
“We had to do a lot of technological work that was unprecedented for us as a team, which was really challenging and exciting,” he added.
Sometimes an app is where it is
Because The New York Times Do you choose to build Crossplay as an app? Petriello told me that a 2-player game (there are no plans to add more players at this time) is, technologically speaking, much more complex than a single-player web game. “It has a social graph that must be connected to it,” Petrielo said. Additionally, Crossplay has a chat feature, “which we don't have in the gaming app.”
However, crossplay also lives within The New York Times Game application container.
I asked Petriello about the resemblance to Scrabble, and while he didn't directly reference the iconic Hasbro game, he told me, “Crossplay definitely draws on the tradition of classic 2-player word games.” However, he also sees clear differences.
“It is unique in its design and in the way we distribute the chips. The bonus spaces, for example, on the game board are different and were optimized for this type of digital social game.”
Petriello said asynchronous play is also a differentiator. “You always play with 2 players, never more. We really think about the… environment you play in and try to optimize it.”
We're in the early days of Crossplay and Petriello hopes to learn a lot from early adopters like me. I told him that when I tried to play against another human player, I kept running into the same opponent, “Kae”, who had already exhausted the maximum number of games they could play at once.
“This game is just at the beginning of its journey and I hope it grows with our audience and we can change it in exciting ways in the future,” he said.
It's not that the game isn't relatively feature-rich. Petriello revealed some non-obvious features, such as the ability to long-press a word on the board and get a dictionary pop-up, the subscriber-only Crossbot that can give you post-game analysis, and how you can choose different difficulty levels when playing against the computer.
“I always recommend that if you're waiting for people, you play a computer game while you wait… you can make them pretty hard, although we're already seeing feedback from people that hard isn't hard enough,” he told me, laughing.
As usual, even now, there are already Crossplay experts who yearn for more.
One thing Crossplay doesn't have is the ability to instantly share your results, although obviously if you're playing against someone, that person already knows.
“We want to see how users share their experiences in Crossplay. It's definitely an area I'm very interested in seeing,” said Petriello, who reminded me that Wordle's involvement “was something invented by the community.”
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