About a year ago we had a crazy idea: take the entire text of a classic book, like Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and break it up sentence-by-sentence into a series of scrambled word puzzles. The puzzles would be scrambled multi-row anagrams, like our previous game Unscramble It, but lifted directly from the text and clued by the context of the surrounding, unscrambled, words.
There were a lot of questions: Would we find enough puzzles to make it interesting? Would the distribution of puzzle difficulties work? How would we render the text to preserve a book-quality reading experience?
We did some experiments to answer those questions and the answers were good! Then we started developing algorithms to automatically process the text and find the best puzzles, and we worked on typesetting the result with print-quality tools, and we kept testing and tuning… and now, finally, OMBY is done and on its way to the app store.
In it’s final form, OMBY presents a series of over 10,000 puzzles that progressively reveal the entire text of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick! OMBY is part word puzzle and part book, and completely addictive!