For almost eight years, I’ve had a goal on my to-do list that I could never get any closer to crossing off. It was building something I knew would take a lot of time, effort, and money to accomplish. I knew where to start; I knew what had to be done. I just couldn’t find the motivation to do it.
Then, in June of this year, I sat at my computer one night and started building. What resulted was the return of an original word game I created in 2012: LetterSlider.
I’ve written about creating LetterSlider, and how it became a Top 100 Word Game in Apple’s App Store in 105 countries. The concept was novel, and to this day still is: slide letters around a game board to spell (the most and highest point value) words. It was a take on those plastic sliding number puzzles but instead with 24 randomly assigned letters in each game.
I shut down LetterSlider somewhere around 2017. Development across iOS and Android was getting too costly versus the revenue I was generating from advertising and in-app purchases. There were acquisition offers — thanks to over 100k installs and a large monthly-active-user base — but nothing exciting enough to hand over the intellectual property.
When I worked at The New York Times, I saw the strategic importance of word games within their overall digital portfolio. (My team was responsible for marketing all of the gaming products.) This was reinforced a few years later when The Times acquired Wordle. Original word challenges have a premium among some valuable audience segments.
At the time I removed LetterSlider from the App Stores, I felt a move to the web, which is platform agnostic, would allow it to flourish with greater accessibility – build once and deploy to anyone with a browser on desktop and mobile. But as previously mentioned, my thoughts were mere mental notes – aspirations, perhaps – and nothing more.
I had written requirements when I first created the game so I dusted those off and started making revisions last year. There is a significant amount of logic involved in game creation, thinking through every “if-then” scenario you can conceive and the impacts. There are letters, words, points, bonus points, and almost a limitless amount of combinations.
Those revised requirements, printed out, sat on my desk for months collecting dust. Until June.
I want to be clear: The fact that I didn’t do anything more with LetterSlider before June has nothing to do with being lazy. I do after all have a full-time job at the NBA and teach within the master’s program at New York University. I also have a family that includes a wife, two kids, and a dog, all of whom deserve much of my attention. I think you see where I’m coming from…
But in June a spark of curiosity piqued my interest in this goal during one late-night session in front of my computer. The thought in my head was what if I built LetterSlider for web by myself? I have experience with coding, albeit not at an expert level by any means. But maybe, just maybe, I could build it to a good enough state that a true web engineer could step in and help it cross the finish line.
So I started writing code: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and some React. Whenever I hit a roadblock, I’d go to StackOverflow, before settling into ChatGPT as my primary knowledge source. In fact, without ChatGPT, LetterSlider would not have launched. Having access to a tool where I could drop in blocks of code, and ask it to confirm or modify it based on explicit expectations and directions was unbelievable. For each update, I’d preview the results, see progress, and be inspired to keep going.
One thing I’ll say about using an artificial intelligence tool like ChatGPT: if you don’t have experience coding or writing requirements, it would be difficult to do what I did. I had to be extremely explicit about what I was looking to change, where in the code I needed to make modifications, and what the expected results were to be. Maybe I would have ended up with the same outcome without being able to read the code, but it certainly helped expedite the timeline to launch.
That timeline ended up being two weeks from when I wrote the first line of code. In late June, LetterSlider returned… on the web at LetterSlider.com.
I couldn’t be more proud of the fact that I no longer have to question “what if” or feel like I may have shut the apps down prematurely. The gaming space, especially via mobile web, is as important and impactful as ever before, which is why now felt like the right time for a reboot.
What happened next, however, was even more inspiring: I looked at my goals and found the motivation to cross another item from the list, something I had on it even longer than the rebirth of LetterSlider. That one domino led to another and now I am continuing my work to accomplish the goals that were nothing more than a recurring item on my list year after year.
A curious spark, one in which I couldn’t even tell you why it got lit, is what led me to reach my goal here. Sure, it took some time and effort – and only minimal financing for an engineer to set up my AWS server – but nothing like I thought it was going to be – certainly not “a lot” as mentioned previously. It took just starting to realize that
I often tell my students that settling is a disease that is easy to diagnose, but hard to get rid of. Yet, at our fingertips, is the opportunity to do whatever we imagine, regardless of our current situation or even existing 9-5 jobs. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t need to be great. It just needs to be done and starting is the best way to find out it may not be as hard as you originally thought.
I learned more in those two weeks of re-creating LetterSlider than I would have at any coding camp. I got my hands in the weeds and built something I’m extremely proud of. Letterlider was a major part of my life after it launched in 2012. Now it can be enjoyed – once again – by an even larger audience.
|
Listen to This Post
 |