Last week I published Radii, my latest game published on Windows Phone 8 & 8.1. It’s a memory recall and pattern-matching game. You are given sixty seconds and a board of circles. A collection of circles briefly expand and it’s up to you to swipe them before the next problem presents itself. You must be quick because the board regularly changes. The board grows, shrinks and rotates. As you find solutions you earn points and time is added to the clock. If you’re fast the points you earn are multiplied and you have a better chance to earn a spot on the global leaderboard.

I thought of the game while developing Squared. Squared’s difficulty was bimodal – it was too easy or too difficult and the moment the game becomes difficult many users were quick to give up. Radii’s game engine is much more dynamic than Squared because it continuously measures the users performance. The better a user performs the harder the game becomes. The worse the user performs the easier the game becomes. The goal of the dynamism is to keep the user engaged and challenged without feeling frustrated. My success criteria for Radii is to see that users play more games and play longer games than Squared users.

Also, I’ve had a lasting desire to build a service that powers an end-user experience so I decided to build Radii’s leaderboard service. It’s a service that’s been built time and time again but all of them seem to have their own nuances. Squared uses a friend’s leaderboard service – which doesn’t provide all of the functionality I desired. Although I may have been able to extend my friend’s service I took this opportunity to build an Azure web service from scratch and now I manage a live site service that’s completely in my hands.