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!

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.

Crossword Fun status update:

• we’ve given a new look & feel to the puzzle game’s website,
• a major bug that messed up the correspondence between words and their definitions is now fixed,
• the website now has a Hall of Fame.

More specifically, you can now visit the Hall of Fame page, select the Crossword Category that interests you and see the best all-time scores, the users that achieved them and the time taken.

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We have been busy. We are taking a brake from 3D game development and have been working on a crossword generator project (made in flash & actionscript) that will generate a new Crossword puzzle with every refresh of the page. We have named this new game “Crossword-Fun” and it is still in early beta.

We kindly invite you to test the application and report bugs or just let us know what you think. The application can be found at the following link:

http://www.immersionfx.com/crossword-fun/crossword.html

The idea is of “Crossword-Fun” is simple: based on online Clue Databases (like dictionary.com) an algorithm selects a random set of words and their corresponding definitions and creates a new crossword on the fly. The user that attempts to solve the crossword will use an intuitive way to match words to the given definitions. Upon successful completion of the crossword, the user’s time will be recorded to the Hall of Fame.

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