In mid-May, on a Monday, I went searching for a quick, fun little word search game for my phone. I didn’t find one, and thus Paper Lantern was born. Details:
I wanted something like the old word search books. The ones where there was a grid of letters and “hidden” in the letters were various words. They were in order, upside down, backwards and on the diagonal. Once a word was found, it was scratched out on the list of words beside the puzzle.
Well. I couldn’t find what I wanted. The games I tried were ad-heavy and focused on upselling. Very “gamified” meaning that you couldn’t just choose what you wanted to play, you had to progress through their forced levels.
Not gonna do it.
Within a few hours, using Xcode, SwiftUI and, not going to deny it, AI assistance, I had a mockup that loaded and sort of played. Diagonal selection didn’t work and the selected words weren’t highlighted.
By Wednesday, I had a functional game. Over the next 10 days I refined the game and changed the name a couple of times. Here is a brief recap of that journey:
It started as WORDLINE. Not a bad name, but not available for usage as an app or a web site.
Next up? TraceWords, with a new background and link to a now defunct web site. Note the “subliminal” message on the game board.
Not surprisingly, TraceWords was also not available. So then, by Saturday, I chose the final name, Paper Lantern. It has no particular meaning, but I like the phrase, and it was available in the App store and I got the domain, paperlantern.app.
By then I had also added a feature to make the game challenging by hiding the words.
I spent some time the refining the sets of words used for the puzzles and have a good variety, from Everyday Words, through Food and Minerals.
Last week I had a brainstorm! LINDSBORG WORDS! So I created a list of over 100 word related to Lindsborg, the surrounding community, our heritage and so on.
I also added a special background, only for the Little Sweden, USA word set, and a special link to Visit Lindsborg in addition to the link to Paper Lantern.
Finally, I got to thinking. Maybe remove the shading on the squares that make them look like game tiles. The books didn’t have that. The first version (below) worked well, but as the Little Sweden screenshot above shows, outlining the whole word works best.
As of this writing the game is currently available via Apple’s free Testflight app. The app itself will be free and ad-free. If you want to try it before it’s released, get in touch and I’ll add you to the Testflight roster.