Since my last newsletter I’ve spent almost all of my spare time working on one thing. The game/app that I mentioned. I lost my Duolingo streak for this, so I hope you like it. Meet Sixtep!
How it came about
While I was designing the type specimen for Wintyr I found myself stacking lines of text—as I usually do—to show off the differences between light and bold, etc. Nothing new. BUT since Wintyr is a monospaced font I realized I could just use my brain to think of six letter words instead of relying on another resource to do that. It became a game of sorts. I realized that with just one or two other mechanics it’d actually be challenging and a lot of fun. So I built Sixtep.
How you play
You can install it right now for iPhone (sorry android users, I’m working on that) but here’s how the game works…
A game starts with a diagonal word with letters on a white background. These letters are locked, meaning you have to use them. All you need to do now is write six words, each six letters. The lines don’t interact (it’s not a crossword). AND you can only use the white letters once per column.
So in this example here 👆 t cannot be used as the first letter for any other word, h cannot be the second letter in any other word…you get the idea. The keyboard won’t let you type those letters, so don’t even worry about it.
That’s it. A timer will make you feel super smart or like an idiot. Don’t worry, some games take me 40 seconds, other games take me 4 minutes. You get much faster as you go. A new daily game is available at midnight 🌚
Other things
It’s completely free to play the daily game but if you want more games, stats, and badges, you have to pay $3.99 to unlock it. No subscription, just a one time payment. It’s like a cup of coffee but you can enjoy it more than once. Worth every penny, in my opinion.
What’s to come
I just pushed out the latest launch update to Apple that enables pro users to change the background color! Not that I don’t love that default yellow, it’s the best. But I know that I’m not like everyone (and I might see colors a little differently than you, tbh). So you’ve got five other options now as soon as that v1.0.2 update rolls out.
And I do adore love badges. I don’t want to spoil what some of them are because that’s half of the fun, in my opinion. I have a handful of new badges written down that will drop in the next few updates, but I don’t see anyone unlocking all of them in the near future. That’d be crazy.
More process stuff
I initially built this out as a mobile website. Just some html, css, javascript, and json files. But I realized that I really wanted a native app and to lean on the Apple community and ecosystem (especially for in-app purchases, which is huge). I hadn’t worked on an iPhone game since Piction, back in 2013. And I only did half of that work. Scott built it out and tried to show me as much Xcode as possible. It was fun, but also a side-project at our regular jobs.
And things have changed since 2013. Now when I get hung up on code, Claude is able to bail me out. But the real MVP during this build was my sister! She’s a tiny bit older but a huge bit smarter and provided invaluable insight during testing. Of all my testflight users (thank you) she logged like 50 wins over the course of a week, or something silly. There’s no plan for a leaderboard for Sixtep, but if there was, she’d be at the top.
The website was fun to put together, and I made it as simple as I could. It looks…a lot like the app. Black/white/yellow is very easy to work with. Plain html, css, javascript, nothing fancy. It gave me a chance to use the lovely Infamous typeface, which I’m tempted to license again for use on this website.
Final thoughts
Because of the nature of the game I realized that some starter words would be almost impossible to solve. A “qu” combo shows up in the middle of a starter word? Good luck with that. Same is true with X for some extent, so I had to remove those from possible options. You can use words with those letters to solve each game, but they shouldn’t be locked letters.
The game dictionary contains over 15,000 words. There are thousands of normal words, and also some like “arbute” and “norias” (plural of noria, which is also a new word to me). I thought about making “s” the last latter (six locked position) of every game but 1-that felt cruel and 2-it severely limits the number of total games. Besides, we all need a break some day. But if I introduce a hard mode, you better believe that every word is going to end in “y” or “s”.
Help me out
If you snag the game, I’d love a five star rating (and a review if you want to be extra helpful). OR (and?) consider sharing the game with a friend. Perhaps your Wordle group chat? Or your book club? I don’t know, just tell everyone about Sixtep.
