Our development process for Honeycomb

Honeycomb is our puzzle word game where you need to find the right words to fill in the puzzle. It's essentially a word search on a hex grid, but the catch is that you only know the first letter of each word.

We just released it on Android and iOS about 2 weeks ago, and so far it's sold about 250 copies (mostly on iOS). This is how we developed the game and got to the final state as shown below: 

The Concept

We previously made a multiplayer word game called Hexicon, and we found that a lot of people enjoyed playing our solo challenges or against the AI. So we decided to make a single-player spin-off to cater to that audience.

We also wanted to constrain ourselves to the same core mechanic - spelling words on a hex grid using a contiguous path of letters. This makes it more challenging to find words since they might zig-zag, double back, or just go in a straight line. We knew players liked this aspect so it would save time to reuse it.

Next, we had to come up with a good puzzle mechanic. I sketched out a grid with several words with different colors. I liked the idea of letting the grid be a random shape and that all the letters were used to make words. There were also a few options of what information to give to the player: (1) no info, (2) only the first letter of each word, or (3) random letter(s) of each word.

I shared the sketches with my team and we decided on the simplicity of showing the first letter. We had realized that puzzles could feature obscure words, so having some consistency would be welcome to players. The final concepts looked like this:

Web App First

We sat on this idea for about 1 year before doing anything with it, but we eventually found a good time for a mini hackathon project.

We start most projects as web apps since developing for web is incredibly fast, and we also had a Hexicon web repo to start from. In the very first day, we had a bare minimum version where we created puzzles by entering them letter by letter in the code. It seemed pretty fun so we pressed on.

A couple days later, we had a working prototype with a puzzle editor and started making puzzles to play amongst ourselves. It was barebones but enough to test the concept:

From there, we polished up the UI a bit, added mobile responsiveness, and added a main screen to contain a list of levels

We initially had only ~75 handmade puzzles in the first web version, so we got our players involved by giving them access to the puzzle editor to crowdsource some content. They came up with hundreds of awesome puzzles, and we featured about 90 of them in Community Packs. This was probably the coolest aspect of this project since we were able to really engage with our players on a creative level.

The design was minimal but effective enough to release as a free, public web version:

We also added a Daily Challenge mode as some people flew through all of the handmade puzzles on the web version. We gave 3 puzzles of varying sizes each day. We made a puzzle generator that followed some basic heuristics such as "prioritize snaking paths" and "don't create holes and tendrils." And of course, we filtered out its word list for bad words and manually reviewed each puzzle before releasing it for quality.

We left the project at the web app stage for another year - it saw its initial spike in users and people had fun with it. We decided to leave it as-is to focus on other projects and figured we could always come back to it.

App Development

We recently got another contract for a board game app and realized that it would soon take up too much time to focus on Honeycomb. So earlier this year, it seemed like the right time to officially release it and get it to a more polished state.

It currently looks like this on mobile, which took about 3 months of work from the previous image:

Thanks for reading and check it out if you like word games or puzzle games! We're quite happy with where it ended up, and you can check it out at the links below!

Google Play

Apple App Store

Free demo version on itch