Built with
Native iOS word game, built in Swift and published on the App Store for a client.
Daily puzzle mechanics drive the return visit, which puts unusual weight on state handling. The puzzle has to be the same for everybody on a given day, progress has to survive the app being closed mid-guess, and the transition at the day boundary has to be unambiguous. Game state persistence covers all of it, so a player can complete a puzzle across sessions without losing a partial attempt.
Share functionality lets players post results, which is the mechanic that made this genre spread in the first place. Getting it right means producing something that reads correctly when pasted anywhere, without leaking the answer to somebody who has not played yet.
The interface work is where a game like this is won or lost. Tile flips, keyboard feedback, and invalid-word shakes are all animation, and animation that stutters makes an otherwise correct game feel cheap. Built with smooth transitions and responsive touch handling, tested across iPhone and iPad screen sizes, and written to respect the iOS Human Interface Guidelines rather than porting a web layout onto a phone.
Accessibility was treated as part of the build rather than an audit at the end, which for a colour-coded game means the state of a tile must be communicable without relying on colour alone.
Written in Swift with Xcode. Shipping through App Store review and distribution is a meaningful part of the work: the build, signing, and submission pipeline is its own discipline, separate from writing the game.
More work