Letter Lattice

Letter Lattice takes word ladders to the endgame by incorporating anagramming, clues, and themes. In one puzzle, you might go from GUITAR to MELODY, like:
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GUITAR>ATRIUM>IMARET>MAILER>MORALE>REMOLD>MELODY

Letter Lattice was started as a passion project while in school. After playing with the idea with pencil and paper, I started using it for various project classes iterating on its UI design and game modes. Released in July 2021 with many subsequent QoL updates, Letter Lattice has over 500 positive reviews and received the Editor's Choice and Game of the Day awards from Apple.

Puzzles all initially began on pen and paper, coming up with potential solve paths for start and end words manually. Given the endless permutations of words you can make, however, this proved to result in many puzzles with not enough solutions and lots of dead-ends.

To combat this, I baked a difficulty-based word list into the puzzle generator to permutate through all possible paths and assign each puzzle a quality and difficulty ranking based on the paths through the state graph. Finally, I integrated with the OneLook API to find common phrases and similar words (CAPO FRET or SLY DOG) to give thousands of puzzle ideas, before picking my favorites to put into packs.

It was important to me to have a free and versatile hint system that helped players solve the trickier 6+ letter puzzles.

Working similarly to the back-end puzzle generation, based on the current state of the graph it checks for words that keep the most paths still available. Using some tuned heuristics it favors words that lead to paths with lower-difficulty word list entries, while ensuring there are still plenty of paths to choose from. It will even tell you if you're stuck!

To keep myself pushing towards publishing while in school, I used AGILE practices and developed in week long sprints, selecting tasks I could bite off with whatever available time I had. The bulk of the game was completed between February and April 2021 across 12 sprints, with several months of bug fixing and testing to follow. I also frequently used spreadsheets for things like puzzle tracking and Game Center integrations.