Word Gems

I designed and developed this game in a month for Staple Games. The brief was to develop a word game that bridged the gap between players of casual "WordScapes"-style mobile games and the more serious crossword and Spelling Bee players.

Rather than traditional word hunts that have you find countless words as quick as possible, Word Gems slows it down and invites you to find longer-than-your-usual words, signposted by gems to collect throughout the grid. The game naturally works to improve your Boggling skills.

This game started in a cafe, drawing out mini puzzles seeded with several interesting words, with clues for each hinted at by the shapes and order of gems to connect through.

Later, I repurposed the gem shapes as an indicate of "uses" before breaking, such that a puzzle is complete when all gems were broken. This worked nicely as puzzles could still be completed (albeit with lower scores) without finding the seeded words.

I eventually coded a puzzle generator that seeded the puzzle with one major word (using all or all but one of the tiles). The generator finds a configuration for the letters in which gems intersect the word at meaningful letter pairings (perhaps the BT of SUBTLE), while allowing for several mid-sized alternate words to be possible for less experienced players just looking to get 5+ letter words.

Each puzzle is given a PRO score that can be reached easily by finding the best word in the puzzle, or by strategically breaking gems using mid-sized words.