Summary

This repository is a Scrabble clone for Android and iOS made with Compose Multiplatform. This project serves two primary purposes:

1. To act as a learning tool for me to learn about Compose Multiplatform development
2. To demonstrate the kinds of cross-platform UIs that can be built using Kotlin Multiplatform + Compose Multiplatform

Scope

For the time being, the scope of this project is to support offline play between two players. In the future, single-player mode against an AI and/or online play against another player may be added.

Note: It is specifically not a goal to publish this app for obvious copyright reasons. This repository exists purely for learning and demonstration purposes.

Challenges

1. A significant portion of the work to get the project in its current state was creating the DragContext API, a custom API for handling drag-and-drop behavior. While I could have simply embedded the drag-and-drop behavior into the Scrabble game logic, that would have too deeply coupled code that could be app-agnostic (gesture handling) and app-specific code (game logic). Instead, I opted to keep the DragContext API completely independent from the game itself, and it is now an external library that this project simply depends on.
2. Another concern is performance, specifically avoiding unnecessary recompositions of the cells in the grid. Since there are 15 * 15 = 225 cells in the grid, it is important that we minimize the number of times that the entire grid is recomposed. Even if Compose intelligently decides not to recompose a leaf composable (i.e. a cell in the grid), if we are not careful, we may still end up in situation where Compose loops through all 225 iterations to check which cells needs to be recomposed, if any. See this commit for an example.

Progress

• Track and display game state (e.g. scores, available tiles, etc)
• Implement drag and drop of player's tiles onto the game board
• Implement shuffle and manual rearranging of player's tiles
• Validate played tiles and compute score
• Implement resign/skip/swap
• Display summary after game end

Demos

Android.demo.10-4-23.480p.mov

iOS.demo.10-4-23.480p.mov