Well folks, it’s that time of the year again for new updates.

We thought it’d be appropriate to change the look of the site first. It’s been, oh, almost 4 years since the first post and, since we have taken an exciting new turn in our productions and our collaborations (as you will soon see), why not change our looks too?

Stay tuned, very soon our new game is… setting sail for the first time and this website will host its first public appearance.

Screenshots, videos and a demo are on the way.

Crossword Fun may belong to an emerging gaming category dubbed “wellness gaming“. Wellness gaming is a very specific genre that is aimed at sharpening the mind and body. It is well-known, for example, that a crossword puzzle can help an elderly mind stay sharp.

What is also interesting is that the “wellness gaming” industry is on the verge of a serious boom. Projected revenue by 2015 is $2 billion.

Here are some excerpts from an article written by Larry Kemp, at The Real Story:

More and more people are having senior moments. As the population slowly ages, there becomes room for these games that focus on brain stimulation. A lot of women don’t play games because they don’t want to waste their time. However, 85% of wellness gamers are women. These games resolve their guilt towards gaming. It becomes more than just a game, it becomes a lifestyle brand.

So what’s the future like? You can bet on more money being poured into wellness and fitness gaming. Keep your eyes peeled for these games to become a lot more mainstream, and appealing to big audiences.

The new version of Crossword Fun is here, fresh and hot, and promises a lot of fun, especially to movie buffs!

Following the popularity of the application, both on the hosted website and on Facebook, we have added an interesting new feature to its functionality: the inclusion of photos. What this practically means is that word definitions are now paired with a relative headshot picture that helps the crossword participant to recognize the person that the definition refers to.

To put this to work, a new category came to play: Movie Actors. Using the popular imdb.com as a source, the application selects trivia information and a photograph of an actor from a selection of over 1,500 actors and actresses and constructs the crossword definition, expecting from the player to identify the person and fill the puzzle with his/her surname. The outcome is very exciting as you can see from the screenshot below:

As always, crossword sources are automatically selected from online crawlers and the puzzler that is generated in every visit is never the same with the one before. Every refresh to the page will take you to a new puzzle to solve, so don’t hesitate, go and test your Movie Trivia knowledge and put your name up there in the Hall of Fame.

As for ourselves, we’re really excited with this new feature and are already planning some new categories to put into use. The possibilities are endless, so stay tuned!

See below the most important key-points to help you play the game:

A new crossword puzzle is automatically generated every time you refresh the page.

When the introduction is over, you are requested to enter a name.

• If you have played the game at least once, the name you have used is already in there for you, so it is recommended that you keep your used name so that the Hall of Fame statistics will remain consistent.
• If you are a first-time player, you should enter a name before proceeding. Make it big and as unique as possible so that it will be distinct on the Hall of Fame. If you have cookies disabled, the system will not remember the name for you, so try to remember the name you used when prompted again in a future attempt.

Click on “OK, Move on“.

In the Options page, you should select the puzzle Category that you wish to auto-generate a crossword for (default is: Word Definitions) and then you may (or may not) toggle some options on/off. These are:

• Skill level: Novice (upon finishing typing a word entirely, the word is highlited in red - false input - or black - correct input).
• Skill level: Expert (No highliting of words or letters while typing.User has no indication whatsoever of the corectness of the word typed).
• Complexity: Lite (Lite complexity means that at most 20 words are included in the generated crossword).
• Complexity: Complex (a complex crossword contains at most 30 words to be discovered).

After making the desired choices, click on “To the Game!“.

Have been tinkering with the Facebook Developer API for over two days to manage to include the Crossword Fun game to their Application Directory. Then, it was necessary to wait for another two days for their system to be updated. I mean, that a simple cron job that should run once a day, needs a whole lot more. Four days in total… Now, that is a lot of wasted time for such a simple task!

I must say that Facebook developers’ experience with the API is as frustrating as Facebook end-users’ experience is (I never liked Facebook as a user, I find it unfriendly to say the least). But even as a developer who wishes to roll out an application to Facebook, you get more of the same sh*t; there is a complete lack of any formal documentation and hardly any testing to the new features that come out. Developers are easily lost and, what should be an easy task, becomes a daunting task! Many things seem to be broken since deployment.

Anyway, after a lot of effort I managed to port the Flash application to Facebook (just a Facebook iframe which hosts the Crossword SWF file) but it still requires some more visitors before being accepted. So, I’d appreciate your click on my link (requires login in to your Facebook account) over here:

http://apps.facebook.com/crossword-fun/

All participations are highly appreciated. Cheers.