Toytek's Mackenzie on bringing The Ultimate Alphabet to iPad

While we're starting to see some boardgames get transformed into decent iPad games, the conversion of hidden item book The Ultimate Alphabet is a very different beast.

Based on a best-selling book, what's key about the project is that it brings interactivity into play, both in terms of the intuitive nature of the touchscreen and wider issues such as helping you work out what the words are, keeping track of your achievements, and using the internet as an information resource.

So following on from the release of the first four letters (A to D), we caught up with Georgina Mackenzie of developer Toytek to find out more about the project and how it came about.

Georgina Mackenzie: The Ultimate Alphabet is based on Mike Wilks's bestselling book which originally came out in 1987.

It's a hidden object puzzle game and consists of 26 stunning and surreal paintings, one for each letter of the alphabet. The aim is to name all the strange items within the paintings. Cryptic clues, hints and jigsaw jumbles are available to help the player get some of the more obscure words.

For example, in the painting of the letter A you may find an abbey, apricot, atlas, artilleryman, ammunition, aardvark, autogyro, astrolabe, aryballos, amputee and the Egyptian god Anubis!

TUA really is the ultimate casual game; you can play it for just two minutes or for several hours.

The iPhone and iPad were made for this game, as the portability and resolution are just ideal. Mike's paintings just look stunning and the touchscreen element really allows the player to get in there and explore the picture.

I had been thinking about wanting to make TUA into a computer game for many years but I was never in the position to try. I had set up my company about a year before and I was a little fed up with what I was working on so I thought I would try to see if I could get in contact with Mike.

I knew it was a long shot because the publishers normally retain intellectual property rights, which could make it too complicated and costly, but I had to give it a go. I did a search on the internet and found him on the Creative Illustrators's Agency website. I spoke to the guys there and explained my idea, and within five minutes I was on the phone to Mike setting up a meeting to pitch the idea to him.

As it turned out there were no IP issues as the rights had been reverted back to Mike. He was really happy to let us run with our idea but first we had to prove that we could get a good enough resolution of the image onto the iPhone.

The iPhone allows a fairly generous image size but we needed double of what was available, and if we couldn't meet that resolution we weren't going to be able to make the game; so we stitched four images together and they had to be uncompressed as the smart compression on the images was screwing up the seams.

Eventually, once we got all the gameplay into place, we had to split those images up even further to free up memory by unloading parts of the image while certain other parts of the game were being loaded.

Plenty of shiny things make people happy! There are hundreds of awards in the form of medals, coins, stars and trophies. There are 45 categories, ranging from Flags to Food, Mineralogy and Weapons, that all the words fit into.

We have had to add the plural for some words and add alternate spellings for other words. The database for all the words in the game is huge. There are over 7,800 words for the letters A-Z.

Anyone who loves words, art, language and puzzle games; a person who wants to expand their general knowledge and vocabulary while keeping an active healthy mind. You really can learn while having fun.

We are hoping the first four letters will be a success and that will help to fund the next four etc, so really right now we will just have to see how the first batch works out.