Word Endings Make Terrible Beginnings

I was watching a friend play a word game where two people took turns making words back and forth. It was cool, but my first thought was this is way too slow.

Then I remembered playing Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine with my family when I was younger. When you cleared a line, you could send garbage blocks to your opponent.

So I wondered: what if I mixed the two?

Instead of taking turns, both players would type in real time. Every word would send a block to the other player, and the block would contain the ending of that word. To clear it, you would have to start your next word with those letters.

Your ending becomes their beginning.

The first prototype

The first version was built for PC. It was rough, but surprisingly fun. The core mechanic worked almost immediately.

There was one problem. I type all day for my career, so when I started playing against my friends, I absolutely destroyed them.

In seconds.

That's where the three lives came from. I wanted being good at typing to matter without letting one player completely run away with the game.

Then English got in the way

The rule sounds simple: the last letters of your word become the first letters of your opponent's word.

But take RUNNING.

NING, ING, NG, G.

Only one of those is really useful as the beginning of another word.

If I always picked the longest playable ending, the game quickly became a parade of ING, LY, and TION.

Technically, the system was working. The game just wasn't very interesting anymore.

Finding better endings

I ended up making the game look at how many words could actually start with a particular fragment. That helped filter out endings that were either impossible or technically valid but annoying to answer.

Then I ran into words that simply didn't have a good ending.

SHIPMENTS is a good example. Its actual ending isn't very useful, but looking just inside the end gives us MENT, which has plenty of possible answers.

That became part of the solution. The game can occasionally look just inside the end of a word for a better fragment, while avoiding things like MUSIC becoming MUS.

Eventually, the goal stopped being finding the mathematically perfect ending. I just wanted the game to keep giving players interesting problems.

ING didn't have to disappear. It just couldn't be the answer every time.

From PC to iPhone

Once the core gameplay worked, I decided to bring it to mobile.

The first version was a little clumsy. The UI had been designed for a much larger PC screen, and some things that worked perfectly fine on a monitor felt terrible on a phone.

After a lot of compromises and tweaking, I eventually got it to a place I'm happy with.

And honestly, the core gameplay is still the part I'm most proud of.

Everything else has just been me figuring out how to turn that original idea into an actual game.