Context
A daily word puzzle lives or dies on the quality of its word list. Vowel Thief strips the vowels from common words (STRGGL, PPRTNTY) and players race the clock to rebuild them. It rewards reading speed and pattern recognition rather than vocabulary size, so a fast reader of 12 can beat an English professor.
Challenge
Produce hundreds of daily puzzles without a person checking every one, and without letting a bad word or broken pack reach players. With only consonants on screen, each skeleton has to lead to exactly one fair answer. One obscure word or proper noun makes the whole puzzle feel rigged.
Approach
We built an automated content pipeline. A 370,000-word dictionary is filtered for frequency, collisions and proper nouns down to a validated pool of about 9,000 words. Every generated pack has to pass an independent validator before it can be scheduled.
How it's built
- Pipeline Python
- App Flutter, with a Firebase backend
- Distribution App Store as Vowel Thief, Google Play as Vowel Heist
Outcome
Shipped through App Store and Google Play review, with Adventure Mode now live alongside the daily puzzle.
What we learned
- The validator finds what you didn't know was there. Checking every pack independently surfaced bugs we weren't aware of.
- Store review wasn't the hard part. Both App Store and Google Play review went through without issues.
- A daily puzzle needs a reason to come back. The puzzle alone isn't enough. A social feed and competition turn a daily game into a habit.
