The Idea

Rocket Farm Studios teamed up with LocaModa, a leader in site-specific interactive social media, to bring the popular word game Jumbli to the iPhone. Already a fan favorite in restaurants, bars, and online, Jumbli merges the strategic gameplay of Scrabble with the fast-paced excitement of pinball.

One of the game’s most exciting features is its real-time integration with Times Square’s iconic Jumbotron, where it’s displayed four times every hour. The challenge was to bring this dynamic, place-based social media experience to the palm of users’ hands. When the "live" icon appears in the top right corner of the app, players know it’s time to compete with others on the big screen.

LocaModa’s expertise in social media combined with Rocket Farm’s deep knowledge of iPhone app development allowed us to elevate the Jumbli experience, expanding the brand’s reach and engaging a new audience of mobile gamers.

Our Strategic Approach

The challenge was to collaborate with 5 different companies to create an app, accounting for sheet music, digital rights, and a store.

While determining how to translate a sheet music store and playback to the iPad, we faced several engineering challenges.

The Notestar app integrated Yamaha’s eCommerce engine with Noteflight’s Publishing Server, as well as the Digital Rights Management servers for Hal Leonard and MusicSales.

Rocket Farm had to utilize the signal processing capabilities of the iPad to handle pitch correction and tempo changes on the iPad in real-time, so users could speed up or slow down playback to match their own speed.

Finally, there was the graphics processing — the display of music scores with advanced animation of page-turning, all tightly synchronized with the playback of one or more audio tracks.

Design

The Experience

UI Design

The goal for Jumbli’s design was to create a seamless mobile experience that captures the excitement of real-time play while remaining intuitive for casual players. The game had to maintain the essence of its beloved online version while adapting to the iPhone’s touch interface.

Rocket Farm ensured that the app was visually engaging, with vibrant graphics and smooth gameplay. At the same time, the integration with Times Square's Jumbotron had to be flawlessly timed, allowing users to feel the thrill of seeing their gameplay on a larger-than-life screen. The "live" feature became a key aspect of the experience, offering users a sense of community and excitement, no matter where they were playing.

Rocket Farm provided a thoughtful and innovative process that got us through a lot of design challenges in a short time. Their work on NoteStar demonstrates the ability to create products that are smooth running, innovative, and well designed.”

- Joe Berkovitz CEO of Noteflight

Development

Making it work

Developing Jumbli for iPhone required close collaboration between Rocket Farm Studios and LocaModa. One of the primary challenges was synchronizing the mobile gameplay with the real-time displays on the Times Square Jumbotron. This required precise timing and seamless communication between the app and the live feed.

Rocket Farm also optimized the app for performance, ensuring that the fast-paced nature of the game translated perfectly to mobile devices, with no lag or interruptions. The result was an engaging, real-time multiplayer experience that connected players across various locations while maintaining the excitement of live competition.

The player portion of the app handled scaling note sizes, allowing for changes in pitch and playback speed. The app had to support page-turning by both the user and the app when in playback mode.

There were also other unique interaction challenges: setting loop points to practice a section repeatedly, adding annotations to the score, and selecting different pitches. With all these , Rocket Farm undertook separate design phases.

The first was focused on the eCommerce store and the other on the playback experience. We actively tested user interactions as they were implemented. This approach was critical as these were ground-breaking features that required more than great paper designs, but the iterative incorporation of real user feedback to get it right.

Rocket Farm Studios were extremely agile in how they presented and iterated on design – whether for the HTML5 store portion or the much more expressive set of interactions incorporated into the playback aspect of the app.”

- Joe Berkovitz CEO of Noteflight

Technology Used