Word Association Tiles

Word Association Tiles is a fast-thinking puzzle game that challenges your brain with clear, confident logic at every step.

This project was designed to build on the growing popularity of word association games while making the most of our in house tile system, which had been refined and expanded over the course of two years. With such a robust foundation already in place, it was a great opportunity to explore a new puzzle experience without reinventing the core technology.

Word Association Tiles relies on a huge volume of content, as players move through levels very quickly. With around half of the tiles represented by icons, this meant creating and managing a vast library of visual assets while ensuring the game remained easy to read and navigate. A key challenge was preventing the interface from feeling visually overwhelming. We aimed to reduce visual noise wherever possible and focus attention on the most important elements. Soft shapes, clear hierarchy, and tactile interactions helped make the tiles feel inviting to tap, creating a more approachable and satisfying player experience.

Contributions

Art Direction
UI & UX
Unity Implementation
Animation
Team Management
Outsource Management

Designed to Scale

As with my other projects, I established a robust and scalable design system from the outset. The goal was to create a framework that was easy for other artists and designers to work within, while maintaining consistency across the product as it evolved.

By defining reusable components, clear visual rules, and clean layouts, the team could iterate more quickly and create new screens with confidence. This approach reduced repetitive work, improved collaboration, and ensured the game could continue to grow without the design process becoming a bottleneck.

An Issue of Volume

Because roughly 50% of the game's content is represented by icons, asset volume became a challenge almost immediately. The art team hand crafted the icons for the first 25 levels, but once the visual style had been established, I created a workflow using Scenario's node based AI tools to generate consistent icon concepts at scale. This dramatically accelerated production and allowed us to create assets for almost any word imaginable. Today, a dedicated team of outsource artists helps expand and maintain the library, which has grown to more than 6,000 icons.

The scale of the content introduced challenges beyond art production. As new categories were added, level designers had to manually select appropriate icons, creating a significant bottleneck in the content pipeline. The diagram below illustrates the complexity involved in delivering even a small batch of new levels. Fortunately, working closely with our engineering team, we have since moved towards a much more robust system that is designed to scale dramatically, with the long term goal of supporting any amount of icons that could conceivably be created.