Last week I noticed that Mochi is running a new contest in partnership with dictionary.com for “word games”.  Since I just released “…palindromes…” two months ago, I thought hat maybe I could get it into the contest. 

I emailed Andrew Shen at Mochimedia, and he told me that to enter the contest I would have to remove …palindromes… from their system, and then add it back again so that the date would show that I had released it within the contest period.

Now, even though …palindromes… was not very popular, there are still portals that feature it using the Mochi game feed.   By removing the game, I would basically render the game unplayable to the few people who actually like it!

Instead of removing …palindromes… I decided to make a new version.  The first thing I did was fix a few problems with the old game that had been troubling me since it launched. 

• I fixed mochi high Scores so they would work correctly
• I added extra time (5 seconds per level) when you replay at a higher level
• I animated the definitions so they would stand-out on the screen

However, to me, this was just not enough of an upgrade to warrant a “plus” version.  So I went back to the list of palindromes I had worked out for the first game, and tried to add a few more.  The problem is, I used all the good ones in the first game.  I had to have another plan.

My wife and I finally got a chance to go out to dinner on Saturday night without the kids.  As we were sitting in the restaurant, I finally relaxed for the first time in weeks…and then the solution came to me:  I would make my own palindromes!! 

Instead of palindromic words, I decided to add phrases that could be spelled the same way forwards and backwards.   Since I was in a restaurant, the first word that came to was “tip”.  I read it backwards:

“pit”

Then together:

“pit tip”

A Palindrome!

Since the words in …palindromes… each have a hint associated with them, i would need to make one up for these phrases.   This one would be something like:

“Advice someone might give you for avoiding traps in the the floor“

Then I looked at that one again, and another one emerged:

“spit tips”

Definition:

“Advice someone might give you for expectorating properly“

At that point I was hooked.   I started to read every word backwards that I came across, just to see if it was another word that could form a phrase that could in some way be logical.

I managed to create about 50 of my own palindromes this way.  Along with some other good ones I found on the internet, I was able to expand .+.palindromes.+. plus significantly:

• I doubled the number of palindromes in the game, and removed some of the old ones to add new ones
• I expanded each level to have 10 puzzles instead of 6.
• I added more time to complete each level
• I added a feature that would check “alternate solutions” for each palindrome ( because “pit tip” could also be “tip pit”

The final game (with one remaining display bug: arrgh!) is the first game entered in to the contest.  You can play it here.