Word Snap! Merge
Can one senior designer ship a full F2P game, fast?
- Role
- Game design, system design, AI co-development, full-funnel ownership
- Studio
- PeopleFun · Thrive Games
- Platform
- Mobile (soft launch)
- Year
- 2026
The problem
The gap between “I can envision this” and “I can build this” used to be measured in months. At PeopleFun that gap was shrinking fast, and I wanted to see how far it could go. I went in with a thesis: one senior designer, with the right AI tooling and a healthy codebase, could take a complete free-to-play game from nothing to soft launch.
I was one of the first designers at the studio to pitch my own game idea and then own all of it, start to finish, on the systems the studio already had in place: the design, the build, the content, the ads and the store page.
What I did
I solo-shipped Word Snap! Merge for PeopleFun under our Thrive Games label in six weeks of full-time work after a 70-hour prototype, built with Unity, Claude Code, six custom orchestrating skills and PeopleFun’s internal platform stack.
- A complete product, not a demo: full IAP with server-side validation, AppLovin MAX ads, a complete analytics taxonomy, 1,200 standard levels, 365 daily puzzles and 20 weekly Word Expedition events.
- The marketing kit too: an HTML5 MRAID playable plus 24 concept mocks, 3 storyboards, ASO copy and five video ads, shipped in 2.5 days.
- Skills calling skills: at the time, six custom Claude skills handled routine content work. level-designer generated levels against validator rules, word-smith curated the dictionary, icon-artist made clue-category sprites, and expedition-creator, expedition-designer and economy-analyst ran the event and economy side.
This isn’t vibe coding. Review, testing and iteration were non-negotiable. The codebase has to stay healthy for humans and AI both.
The result
Word Snap! Merge soft-launched in May 2026. Under the hood, daily mode, Word Expedition events, currencies and FTUE patterns are all decoupled from the gameplay core, so the core can change without rebuilding everything around it.
The bigger win was what it proved. Word Snap! Merge was one of the first games to give the studio guidance and inspiration for how it would transform its processes with AI.
The tools have moved fast since. Those skills were a learning step that let me go faster than ever at the time. Today I release full games in three to four weeks.
