Unzipped: How we created a novel word game
The Inspiration
We slowly rolled forward in a procession of agitated Boston drivers making their way home from work on a chilly winter evening. My wife and I left our two cats and warm apartment to trek down to our friends in Jamaica Plain for our weekly movie night, so we joined rush hour as outsiders – observers.
It had been almost a year since we launched our first word game and we officially had the bug. It is in this state of mind that inspiration strikes and ideas take root. We entered the grid-locked rotary and I complained to my wife that this person wasn’t abiding by the unwritten “zipper-merge” rule and letting us in. We spent the remainder of our commute brainstorming how to design a word game based on a zipper mechanism and whether it would be fun and unique. Ah, the joys of Boston traffic!
The Challenge
I had two major goals I wanted to achieve with Word Zip:
Create a unique puzzle paradigm with an equally unique user experience.
Build this game with scalability and cost in mind.
GOAL #1: NOVELTY
The central paradigm for the game is incredibly simple: given two pools of letters, create as many words as you can by taking letters from alternating pools. This in and of itself is somewhat derivative of a game like Spelling Bee from NYT: given a group of letters and a specific constraint, build as many words as you can. The magic of Word Zip comes from how we design these puzzles and how the player interacts with them.
The Human Element
Let’s be honest: NYT and Linkedin have created compelling platforms for daily games that have become wildly successful. If I’m going to build a daily word game, it needs to offer something that doesn’t already exist in the mainstream. In my time building and studying daily word games, I’ve identified that a key element in successful games is a human element.
In my time building and studying daily word games, I’ve identified that a key element in successful games is a human element.
A puzzle is an opportunity to forge a connection between author and player through humor, reference, and delight. Without this human element, a game can feel sterile or random instead of charming. With Word Zip, I eventually found that human element within the database of words used to build each puzzle.
After some initial user testing, it became clear that players loved giving us their opinions on what should and should not be a valid word. After all, vocabularies vary widely from person to person, region to region, and culture to culture. What at first seemed like an impossible task of catering to everyone became more and more realistic as we leaned into subjectivity.
I built an internal tool (aptly named Puzzlemaker) that would spit out a list of solutions given a 10-letter starting word. This allowed us to sit and comb through the automatically generated list and cherry-pick the words that would make it into that puzzle. Our general formula is to include any words that are culturally relevant or common English – which is obviously highly subjective. And this is important: players love to complain. Instead of desperately trying to appease everyone, we learned to lean into this discourse and give the players that power. The bottom line is to foster passion in any form because that means we, as game developers, have made something that matters to you. If you don’t agree with a word’s inclusion or omission, complain to your friends or send us an email. Let’s work on improving this game together!
The bottom line is to foster passion in any form because that means we, as game developers, have made something that matters to you.
The User Experience
When you think of web-based daily word games, you generally think of utilitarian design. Black text, white background, squares, grids, etc. And this design makes sense: it should support the objective of the game and foster an approachable user experience. Too much flair could distract from the puzzle itself and too much movement might not translate to all types of devices and screen sizes. So what type of design supports Word Zip’s objective?
My first idea, and the idea that really pushed me to build this game, was to implement a functioning zipper that players would zip up. This type of interactivity exists in popular games (for example: Strands by NYT has players dragging their finger to spell words on a grid), but I felt strongly that the combination of flavor and interactivity was something truly worth exploring in Word Zip. This design cue led to a top-down build in which everything was informed by this one element – every aspect of the game must support the zipper.
This design cue led to a top-down build in which everything was informed by this one element – every aspect of the game must support the zipper.
Given this mindset, I made the decision to focus on a vertical layout in which players would be typing with their thumbs and zipping the words upward (like zipping up a jacket). I wanted to optimize for mobile users and really leverage touch-screen interaction to amplify the feeling of zipping words.
The biggest challenge was fine-tuning the zip animation to feel fluid and satisfying while maintaining the pace of the game. If the animation was too slow, a faster player would get frustrated while waiting for the animation to finish before being able to zip the next word. If the animation was too fast, it would lose the satisfying effect of zipping letters together.
On top of the animation concerns, I had to ensure that the look and feel of the zipper persisted on any size screen, and that players with smaller phones would get the full experience. These concerns informed my decision to limit the number of letters in a word to 10, so that players could not create an infinitely long zipper and break the structure of the game. In turn, this decision also solidified how puzzles would be created: We would choose a 10-letter "secret word" and break that word into the two pools of letters. Once we landed on these constraints, the rest of the game elements started falling into place!
This is merely scratching the surface of how everything came together, and I will elaborate in future blog posts on design, database architecture, puzzle algorithms, and marketing.
In my next post, I’ll dive into my second major goal: How I achieved greater scalability for Word Zip than with previous games, and why this is so important for independent developers.
Thanks for reading and playing!
Sincerely,
Developer Steve