WordMonger was developed by Foundation 42, an independent mobile developer based in Bruges, Belgium founded by Christian Beaumont and his wife Behnaz Beaumont. The company recently switched its focus to Windows Phone 7, having previously dipped its toes in the iPhone and Zune marketplaces, and is now working on a "cowboy shooter" game, for release next year, titled Appaloosa.
Crucial to making Windows Phone 7 an attractive proposition to iOS' huge developer base, Beaumont found the conversion process relatively painless, with the familiarity of XNA and Visual Studio development tools proving a huge boon. The short span of WordMonger's conversion from iPad to Windows Phone 7 is testament to this, taking only a day to port and ten to polish. "It's not completely seamless, but it's fairly close," he explains.
"Access to the keyboard and networking hardware have different APIs, but the biggest issue was the different device resolutions - when we did the iPad version we had to completely redo the graphics as the screen was so big. The Windows Phone 7 version is, again, much higher resolution than the original 3G and 3GS that we were working on - it's actually more similar to the iPad's graphics than it is to the old iPhone stuff."
Beaumont thinks that there is a great deal of interest within the development community in working on the Windows Phone 7 thanks to the ubiquity of its tools, adding, "There’s got to be close to a million people who know how to use .Net." The fragmentation of devices served by the previous Windows Mobile store made it difficult to secure a revenue stream, a problem now rectified by the much improved Marketplace and standardisation of hardware under the Windows Phone 7 banner.