Undergrad student creates word-based game for iPhone

(PhysOrg.com) -- A recently released iPhone and iPad application may seem like a challenging word game for most. But to one undergraduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, it’s the culmination of a dream.

Sophomore Kate Stuckman created Professor Wordington’s Spellatorium, a word-based game that allows the user and an opponent to take turns adding letters to a word fragment. The point of the game is to not be the player who ends up spelling a word, or to be the first to point out that a word cannot be spelled from the growing letter cluster.

“I worked mainly on the game concept and the artificial intelligence that dictates the actions of the computer opponent,” said Stuckman, who based the game on a word game she played with her father.

Stuckman, who is majoring in electrical engineering and minoring in computer science and mathematics, took three years of computer science in high school. She began working on the game independently during the summer of 2009 shortly after graduation from high school and presented her work to InMotion Software in 2010, who agreed to publish the game.

Stuckman then interned with InMotion Software during the summer of 2010 where she worked with the other programmers to explain how the game works and helped convert her game from Java to C++ and Objective C, as well as implement additional ideas and improvements to the artificial intelligence. During the fall she continued to give feedback to InMotion until the game was finished in December and was recently released to the public.

“It is really exciting to see that after all this work, we have finally reached a finished product that we are proud of,” she said.