Word Search Incremental Co. is a word search on a giant board. Your goal word is hidden just once, somewhere in 65,536 letters, and the biggest board holds 16,777,216. If it were printed with each letter 1 cm wide, that board would be 41 m on each side, while a basketball court is only 28 m long.
A board that big is a lot to search alone, so the game is also an incremental, the kind of game where you earn, spend and watch your numbers grow. Every other word you swipe pays credits, and credits hire cows who clear the board while you look. The cows never take your word, though, so the find is always yours. There is no timer, no energy and no lives, and the game plays offline and speaks 20 languages. On Google Play now.
Inspiration
Before this game, I made Find That Color. Its biggest board holds every colour a screen can show, all 16,777,216 of them, each one exactly once, and your job is to find the single tile that matches your colour.
Even after that game was finished, the canvas stayed with me. A grid of 4,096 by 4,096 is far more than a phone can show at once, so you zoom in and out, and the size itself becomes part of the fun. It is almost silly to look at, and I liked that, so I kept asking myself what else a canvas that big could hold if it held something other than colours.
Then I thought of letters. A word search is already a game about looking closely at a grid and finding the one thing hidden in it, which is just what Find That Color asks of you, so it fit the huge canvas almost perfectly. I filled the same 4,096 by 4,096 grid with letters and hid one word in it, and that became the biggest board in this game. Everything else grew from there.
What it does
One word wins the board. Your goal word sits at the top of the screen, hidden once in the board: across, down or slanted, forwards or backwards. Find it, swipe it, and the board is yours.
Every other word pays. While you look, you can swipe any real word of three letters or more to earn credits. Longer words pay more, and a wrong swipe costs nothing.
Credits hire cows. The cows are your coworkers, and each kind does one job:
- Cleaner: clears letters that no word can use. Your first one is free.
- Cashier: swipes words and pays you, but stops if it bumps into your word, so a stopped Cashier tells you where to look.
- Labeler: colours one letter of your word, everywhere it goes.
- Four more open later with bells: the Sorter, the Recycler, the Auditor and the Moonager.
Every letter the crew clears is gone for good, so your word slowly gets easier to see. You can pause any cow, or the whole crew, whenever you want to look by yourself. The board is split into sectors, squares of 64 x 64 letters, and the map shows where each cow is and what it has cleared.
Start small. Everyone starts on size S, with 65,536 letters and a short How to play. When you find the word on your biggest size, or clean five of its sectors, the next size opens, and there are five sizes in all, up to XL with 16,777,216 letters.
Keep what you earn. You can end a board whenever you like, and your points and bells stay with you. Points buy upgrades that last, and bells, which come from finding the word on size M or bigger, let you hire more cows.
Many ways to play. Words come in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Japanese katakana, or you can pick Places, where only countries and cities count. There are Day, Paper and Night themes, and you can hold the phone upright or sideways.
Ads and Premium. The game is free. If you want a reward, you can watch a short video for it: faster cows for ten minutes, a crate of points, or double points at the end of a board. A small banner sits in its own strip under the board, and one full-screen ad plays between boards, but only after you end a board yourself. Finding the word never brings an ad. Premium is one purchase through RevenueCat that removes the banner and the full-screen ad and gives you the rewards without the videos.
How we built it
I built it alone, and one set of code makes both the iPhone and the Android app.
The 16,777,216 letters are never stored. Instead, the game works out each letter from the board's number and the letter's place, so every phone sees the same board. The screen only draws the letters you can see, and the word checking runs in the background, so your swipe never has to wait.
RevenueCat handles Premium: the price in your own money, the purchase, and getting it back on a new phone. It also counts the ads. There was no ready-made way to send ad results to RevenueCat from this kind of app, so I wrote a small bridge for iPhone and Android that tells it when each ad loads, shows and earns, and where in the game it ran. Ads are asked for without a personal profile, so there is no tracking prompt, and with Premium the app does not load ads at all.
Challenges we ran into
- Two kinds of game that pull apart: a word search is about finding one thing, while an incremental is about numbers going up. The work was letting the cows help without taking the find away, which is why they never take your word.
- Why cows: I called them bots at first, but a mascot gave the game more personality, "coworkers" fit, and honestly, I just like cows.
- A board this big on a phone: sectors show your progress long before the find. With the cows helping, a board took me a little over an hour, and finally finding the word was really satisfying.
- Ads in a calm game: an ad right before a shop feels like being sold to twice, so the full-screen ad waits until you leave the Workshop, and the banner waits until your first board starts.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- I still play it every night before bed, one-handed, with the phone upright.
- It plays upright or sideways, and each way has its own layout. Held sideways, the crew moves into a sidebar next to the board, so the letters and the cows are on screen together.
- Seven cows, each with one tool. A Cashier that bumps into your word turns red, sweats and sits still, but it never points at the word.
- The menus speak 20 languages, each checked to fit on small phones, and Places shows country and city names in 14 of them.
What we learned
In a game like this, balance, motion and action all need care. An incremental wants to show off, with numbers climbing, coins flying and cows at work, but a word search needs quiet so you can look hard at the letters. Too much of the first breaks the second, because every flash pulls your eyes off the search. In an early build, every milestone put a paper receipt over the letters, and a new player met seven of them in a first session. So the game now follows four rules:
- Good news stays small. A word's pay shows on that word's own line, not over the letters around it.
- One event, one message. A new board size gets one note, not a note and a milestone card, and what you earn at the end of a board goes on its receipt.
- Small notes leave on their own. A note goes away after a few seconds, or sooner with one tap.
- You choose how much moves. Motion has three settings, Full, Calm and Off. Calm drops the celebrations and milestone notes, and Off stops all motion. If your phone asks for less motion, the game starts on Calm.
Balance works the same way: the cows can do almost everything except the find, so the game never plays itself.
What's next for Word Search Incremental Co.
- Launch, then tune: real players will show how long each board size takes, and that will decide the next changes.
- More boards like Places: boards where only one kind of word counts. Football players and movie titles are the next ideas to try, but each one needs a good word list that I am allowed to use, so for now they are ideas, not promises.
- Word meanings: swipe a word and see what it means. It is built for the Japanese board and switched off until it is ready.
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