游戏邦注：本文作者为William Volk，文章主要讲述手机版《Crickler》的漫长酝酿过程。

游戏未问世前总是显得姗姗来迟，劣质游戏唯有改善方能除去恶名。——宫本茂（《Mario Bros》设计师）

《Crickler》是款历经艰难险阻的应用。究竟有多难？查阅旧邮件后，我发现自己2003年就萌生将其移至手机平台的想法。为何如此姗姗来迟呢？这说起来是个有趣的故事。

将《Crickler Daily Word Puzzle》移至手机平台的过程十分激动人心，堪称一部手机游戏发展史。游戏移植手机平台耗费的时间直接反映着我们对这款游戏的期待度，我们希望其能够匹敌，甚至超越原始Flash游戏的用户体验。

首先谈谈背景故事。《Crickler》发行于2001年，目前以Flash格式运作于全球40个新闻网站。这个字谜游戏包含句子填充和词语填充形式。词语之间通常共享字母。调试部分是个阻碍系统，其会改变所选词语和共享字母数量。以下是游戏截图：

Crickler Flash from gamasutra.com

这款经典谜题游戏是基于当天新闻，但谜题涉及任何主题。

那么为何我们会首选手机作为植入平台呢？

我初次涉足手机游戏领域（游戏邦注：大约是2002年）所见到的游戏“都是仿Gameboy游戏，只是略逊一筹。”当时手机屏幕很小（我曾将一款游戏投放至64×64像数手机），容量有限（最糟糕的时候内存还不到64KB）。

我难以理解的一点是游戏似乎没有充分利用手机设备的连网特性。老实讲，深入研究后，我很惊讶其开发系统竟然如此不尽如人意。2004年试图制作手机网络游戏（多人模式）的任何人士都知道这有多荒谬。

《Crickler》似乎充满希望。游戏能够利用手机设备的连网特性每天呈现新鲜新闻字谜游戏。游戏不要求即时数据连接，这对当时的平台状况而言十分重要。2004年我们甚至将模型投放至某些诺基亚手机：

Crickler N60 from gamasutra.com

问题是体验效果很糟糕（游戏邦注：如需多次点击选取字母）。所以最后慢慢淡出大众视线。

再到2007和2008年。配备强大应用浏览器的iPhone问世了。iPhone推出后，我们开始瞄准该平台制作几款网页应用。最初是类似“打地鼠”之类的简单游戏《iWack》，但随后陆续推出《二十一点》、《保龄球》和《西洋双陆棋》之类的休闲游戏，当然还包括《Crickler》：

Crickler Web from gamasutra.com

虽然这些游戏胜过之前的诺基亚体验，但还是不尽如人意。玩家需点击所有字母空格，然后再输入字母。这虽然是网页脚本语言的一大进步，但着实尚有不足。我们这里就不一一陈述。

幸运的是，苹果支持本土应用，所以制作本土版《Crickler》的行动就开始了。即便我们能够修改弹出键盘，添加方向按键，体验依旧无法达到我们的预期。最后我们把各个模块组合起来，不仅仅是植入支持应用交易活动的支付方式那么简单。

所以随着手机平台的成熟，我们能够制作同原始游戏匹敌的体验。我们仍旧注重确保游戏在信号缺失情况下能够正常运作（游戏邦注：例如，当字谜目录出现时，所有新字谜都要预先装载，这样若玩家将iPhone带上飞机，就仍然能够选择新字母游戏进行体验）。

Crickler from gamasutra.com

即便是今天，手机和平板电脑仍旧有着不容忽视的限制因素。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Making Crickler Mobile, Why Did It Take Eight Years?

by William Volk

A late game is only late until it ships. A bad game is bad until the end of time.- Shigeru Miyamoto (Creator of Mario Bros)

Crickler was a difficult app to get out.  How difficult?  After checking my old emails, I realized that I first started to think about getting this onto a phone back in 2003.  Why did it take so long for this to happen?  Well that turns out to be a very interesting tale.

The story of bringing Crickler Daily Word Puzzle to mobile is in a way, the story of the evolution of mobile gaming.  The time it took to bring it to mobile is a reflection of the desire to do this game right, to match and in some ways exceed the user experience of the original flash based title.

First some background.  Crickler was launched in 2001 and currently runs, in Flash on over 40 Newspaper websites worldwide.  It can be thought of as an ‘adaptive’ crossword puzzle.  The puzzle consists of sentences missing a word or words that needs to be filled in by the player.  Letters are shared between words.  The adaptive part is a handicapping system that changes what words are selected and how many letters are shared.  Here is a picture of a section of the Flash game (you can sample this at Crickler.com):

The typical puzzle is based on the news of the day, but the puzzles can be about any subject.

So why did we want this on a mobile device in the first place?

When I first started in mobile gaming (2002 or so) the games I saw were “Just like Gameboy tltles, only worse”.  The screen sizes were tiny (I recall doing one title for a 64×64 pixel display) and memory limited (64KB or less in the worst cases).

The thing I didn’t get was that the games didn’t seem to be taking advantage of the connectivity of the device.  To be honest, when I looked deeper I was shocked at how poor the development systems were.  Anyone who struggled to get network play (multiplayer) working on a mobile phone in the 2004 time-frame knows how crazy it was.

Crickler looked promising.  It could take advantage of the connectivity of the device to present a new News Puzzle every day.  It didn’t require ‘real-time’ data connectivity which was critical given the state of the platforms.  By 2004 we even had a prototype running on some Nokia handsets:

The problem was, it was frankly … awful to play.  Multi-tapping in letters and all of that.  So that was out.

Fast forward to 2007/8.  The iPhone shows up with a pretty decent web browser for apps.  We started putting out web apps for the iPhone the weekend it shipped.  Initially simple stuff like a “whack a mole” game called iWack … but eventually a collection of casual games like blackjack, bowling, backgammon etc…  and of course, Crickler:

But the user experience, while better than the old Nokia handset, was still cumbersome.  You had to click in each letter space and then enter a letter.  An impressive achievement in web scripting, but still lacking.  We choose not to make it public.

Luckily Apple did launch native apps, so the effort to have a native Crickler was begun.  Even then, until we had the ability to modify the pop-up keyboard to add ‘arrow’ keys, it still wasn’t quite the experience we wanted to provide.   Eventually all the pieces came together, not the least of which was the in-app purchase system to enable a way of monetizing the application.

So as the mobile platforms matured, it became possible to match the experience of the original game.  Care still had to be taken to insure proper operation in the case of signal loss.  For example when the catalog of available puzzles is looked at, all the new ones are preloaded so that if you were to take the iPhone onto an airline flight, you would still have the ability to select a new puzzle to play.

Even today, mobile phones and tablets still have limitations that need to be respected. （Source：gamasutra）