BENGALURU: After being featured by Apple as the ‘best new game’ in 12 countries, Bengaluru entrepreneur’s word game Signtist participated in the recent Mobile Premier Awards in Barcelona.
The game scored over other competitors vying to become the Indian entry for the awards at an Intel-sponsored contest.
Signtist, developed by Arpita Khadria’s Bezzerk, uses permutation combinations and line patterns to hint at the right word. A line passes through the 3x3 nine-box grid. Each box has three or more letters of the alphabet, and resembles the T9 mobile keypad it was inspired by.
A dot appears in the right order in each box with a letter in the word, and the user has to figure out the right combination.
“Signtist helps improve spellings, vocabulary and even general knowledge since we have trivia as clues. It’s a brain teaser and a lot of fun,” says Khadria, currently in Barcelona for the event.
The app, with free versions available on Android and iOS platforms, has three sections: category, vocabulary and challenges. The category section has more than 20 topics such as animals, sports, countries and languages, many of which can only be unlocked through in-app purchases.
The app has seen 25,000 downloads. For those who prefer to work out problems with pen and paper in hand, Signtist puzzle books — the format the game initially hit the markets in — are also available on popular e-commerce websites.
Khadria, who has had a stint with Fastrack Sunglasses as assistant brand manager, Titan Industries and McCann Erickson as copywriter, says she hit upon the idea for the game as she was typing on her T9 mobile keypad. “I began observing how my name would look as a pattern.
And then I turned the whole thing on its head and realised that it makes for a lovely puzzle because it involves a permutation and combination of letters,” says the 33-year-old who holds the copyright for the game in 135 countries.
The game took months to perfect. Initially, it was just lines on the grid. But then Bezzerk’s four-member team figured out that dots were necessary to prominently point at the letters. The idea of inserting a keypad below the grid was considered and discarded due to lack of space.
Khadria, also co-founder of Barefoot, a brand-building firm for start-ups, says the game is called Signtist as it is an original idea for word puzzles from India.
“If you look at the genre of word puzzles, there has not been much disruption since the mid-1900s when word search was invented. Games like Ruzzle, Boggle and Words With Friends are all based on incremental changes made to old inventions. Signtist is here to change that,” she explains.
The varying difficulty levels allows for players across age-groups, she says. “Since the game is inspired by the mobile keypad, it has a certain familiarity to it... Even seven-year-olds are able to play it,” she explains.
Hence, she wants to reach it to a wider family audience.
“We want to be part of your daily life. You should have one Signtist puzzle daily in the newspaper to solve, just like Sudoku. Nothing stops us from making quizzes out of this format for classrooms.
It can also become a competitive format,” says Khadria, who has been a guest lecturer at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIM-B), TAPMI (TA Pai Management Institute) and Centre for Management Studies, Bangalore.