I’ve been working on building my mobile development portfolio. While reviewing my repositories on GitHub, I came across a word game I wrote in ColdFusion for a presentation about Regular Expressions. I figured it might make a decent game, so I chose to implement it as my next iOS application.

Jumbly is a word jumble-type game, where you are given two words. Starting with the first word, you must create a new word by changing a single letter, and keep doing so, until you arrive at the last word. Here are instructions that I included in the application:

Starting with the first word, change a single letter in each word to produce a new, valid word. Fill in the spaces provided until you reach the last word. There may be more than 1 solution to each puzzle. Valid words are those that are available in your phone’s dictionary. Invalid words appear in red. If you change more than 1 letter between words, the invalid word will be italicized. You can start at any of the blank spaces. Sometimes it’s easier to start at the bottom. You can use the icons on the right of each word to reorder them. Hitting the info icon to the left of each word will show the dictionary definition of the word. Press enter when editing a word to continue.

It’s available in the iTunes store, and the complete source is also available. For the icon, I used the iDraw program on my iPad. Beging used to Illustrator for vector illustration, I found it surprisingly full-featured. Aside from a few idiosyncrasies, I highly recommend it.