A built a great game that i can't ship

Or rather, I copied a great game and can’t feel good about shipping it.

It started as a travel problem. My wife and I love a tabletop word game called A Little Wordy, designed by Matt Inman and distributed by the good folks at Exploding Kittens. It’s a two-player game and it basically lives on our kitchen table. I travel for work, and the kitchen table doesn’t come with me, so I built a version my wife and I could play on our phones from different cities.

I built a carbon copy of the game mechanics. Same clue types, same scoring, same structure, same everything. That’s what we like to play, so I made it. The one thing I made my own was the look. A Little Wordy has no digital version, and the physical game is bright and playful, so I went the other way, something quieter, more like a letter between two friends. That part I liked, and it’s still around in Have Words.

Designing games is hard!

A copy of someone’s game is still their game. I could dress it up in my own design, but the thing that makes A Little Wordy good is Matt Inman’s game design, not my screens. Putting my name on it and selling it was never really on the table.

So I spent a few weeks trying to make it actually mine. The plan was to change the core mechanics enough that the game underneath would be something I owned. A different clue structure, different scoring, a different shape to a turn.

It… didn’t go well. A Little Wordy is tuned really tight. Every piece is balanced against every other piece, so the moment I changed one thing, something else broke. The delicate balance of using a clue to get info, but giving your opponent points in the process. Or the clever way that actually guessing your opponent’s word isn’t (necessarily) the game winning action. Any change I made broke the finely-tuned balance. The game was really well built, which is probably why my wife and I love it.

Walking away

So I stopped. I could keep failing to launder someone else’s game into mine, or go build something that was mine from the start. I went with the second one. That became Have Words.

Cluent wasn’t a waste, though. It taught me GameKit and Game Center the hard way, which is apparently the only way I learn anything. Now I know all about async turns, match state, all the stuff Apple’s docs probably mention but I couldn’t find. The networking in Have Words is built on what I picked up there. I didn’t bring any of the not-quite-working code, only the hard lessons learned.

It gave Have Words its vibe, too. That quieter, letter-style treatment is basically where Have Words started.

Cluent still sits on my phone, full of little bugs I’ll never bother fixing, since there’s nowhere for it to go. I’m fine with that. It did its job, just not the one I built it for. (And my wife and I still play it regularly!)

More on how Have Words came together as I go. If you want to know when it ships, the list is at havewords.games.