SpellTower, the award-winning word game for iOS, is part of the first wave Mountain Lion-ready games in the Mac App Store today, with Retina graphics and support for Game Center leaderboards and achievements shared with iOS, a Mountain Lion only feature.
SpellTower is a word finding game – click your way through letters set up in a grid, creating words from adjacent letters. The visuals, the sound, and the simple pleasure of finding longer and better words all shine through, making it a joy to play. But how does a game designed for the touchscreen of your iPhone or iPad work on the Mac?
Developer Zach Gage has thought it through, and made some changes to the game’s interaction that make it suitable for a mouse-centered experience. He’s made the game windowed instead of fullscreen, making it easy to keep it running in the background for quick bursts of play in between other Mac activities, like spreadsheets. It’s also a thin, vertical window, ideal for tiling up next to a different app window and playing while you browse the web, read Twitter, or (gasp) do your homework.
In addition, Gage changed the way the mouse works in the game. In other word games, like Scrabble, the mouse is used to click a letter, drag, and release. This control system is present in SpellTower, but he also added an alternate scheme. In SpellTower for MAc, you can click on a letter, release, and click on the next letter, and the next, and so on, re-creating the feel of a tapping motion on a touchscreen.
There’s also a new Night Colors scheme for playing at night, and Gage plans on adding more stuff like iCloud Support for cross platform game synchronization as well as multiplayer support for the Mac version. The game is available now in the Mac App Store for $3.99, and it’s compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and up.
