My Role:

Game Designer, Systems Designer, Level Designer

In Letter Slots, my core responsibilities were writing the MVP design spec, defining the game's vision, and owning the systems and level design through prototyping and market testing.

I was part of a rapid prototyping team with the goal of developing new games of high production quality in a short timeline, using user research and market analysis to identify the most promising opportunities. As the designer on Letter Slots, I worked from ideation through to market test, analyzing early player data to determine the project's next steps.

During the project's development, my main notable contributions were:

• Identify the concept and write the MVP design spec based on user research indicating significant player overlap between word games and casino games, then pitch and align the team on the game's vision and identity before production begins.

• Define the game's core identity, making the deliberate decision to lead with word game mechanics and support with casino elements, rather than splitting the difference and risking a weak identity in both genres.

• Design the game's core systems. Word Multipliers, the Jackpot mechanic, and the Lightning Meter each serve both as engaging player-facing features and as behavioral levers to shape the pacing of a session.

• Analyze early player data post-launch to identify onboarding friction, pacing irregularities, and retention patterns, using findings to inform whether to iterate, continue production, or sunset the project.

Project Process & Breakdown

Pre-Production: Letter Slots originated from user research showing meaningful overlap between word game players and casino game players. The hypothesis was that a game combining both could appeal to a wider audience than either genre alone.

As part of a rapid prototyping team, the design process began with generating new game concepts as 1-pagers, which were discussed and filtered based on their market potential. Letter Slots was selected as a strong candidate. I wrote the MVP spec, which was proposed to the team before production of the first playable began.

A key early decision was whether to build Letter Slots as a word game with casino elements or a casino game with word game trappings. Sitting in the middle risked a game with no clear identity — unappealing to both audiences. With Peoplefun's deep expertise in word games, we committed to leading with that strength: a word game first, with casino mechanics layered in to amplify the experience.

The core concept drew from Boggle — a free-form board of letters where players spell words for points, but with one critical addition: players could refresh the board at will once they felt they had extracted its value. The casino layer came from making each board feel variable in potential, with low-yield spins and occasional massive win moments creating the rhythm of a slot machine.

Core Mechanics:

Word Multipliers: Some letters were assigned score multipliers that stacked multiplicatively across a single word. A word threading through several high-multiplier letters could yield dramatically outsized payouts. This rewarded players who took the time to find clever, high-value paths through the board rather than defaulting to the easiest words.

Jackpot: To deliver the casino feel, a jackpot mechanic was essential. The trigger was spelling a word of six letters or more, which was a deliberate choice, since word game players take genuine pride in finding long words, and therefore, the jackpot should feel earned through skill, not luck. The jackpot value was prominently displayed on the HUD and grew with every spin, serving two purposes:

1. Discourage players from exhaustively hunting every word on a board, but instead nudging them to cash out and chase the next spin once a board's value was largely extracted.

2. Build mounting anticipation so that landing a strong board with jackpot potential felt like a genuine payoff.

Lightning Meter: A lightning round mechanic emerged from the team's tech artist. This was an auto-spin bonus where the game rapidly found words across the board in a flashy, spectacle-driven sequence. Initially triggered by spelling words containing lightning token letters, early testing revealed that players were simply spinning until they landed boards with those tokens and moving on without meaningfully engaging with the boards. The trigger was reworked to be effort-based: every word spelled contributed to the meter, with longer words filling it faster. This encouraged players to find a natural balance — hunt for quality words, refresh when the board ran dry, rather than grinding three-letter words or chasing tokens passively.

Challenges:

The most persistent challenge with Letter Slots was the open-ended nature of the player experience. Some players would spell two or three words and spin immediately; others would methodically work through every combination before moving on. This wide variance in playstyle made it very difficult to predict or control where a player would be at any given point in a session, or to design meaningful milestones around it.

The Jackpot, Multipliers, and Lightning Meter all applied pressure in the right direction, but were not enough to unify the majority of players. Without an objective win condition or a clear moment that tells the player "this spin is done, move on", player pacing remained hard to shape. In the end, we decided to sunset the project due to a number of factors, but the project taught me a lot of useful lessons.

Takeaways:

Without a clear win condition, it is very difficult to gauge or unite player progress. Players can be at vastly different points in their session at the same elapsed time, making it hard to design for retention milestones or meaningful progression. In casino games, the reel settling is that moment. In word games like Wordscapes, it's the level complete screen. Letter Slots sat between both and lacked either.

The research showed genuine overlap between word game players and casino players — but overlap in audience doesn't automatically mean the two genres mix. Just because two things are good individually doesn't mean they're better together. That tension was the defining creative challenge of this project, and a lesson that has shaped how I approach hybrid genre concepts since.