Vowel Thief

Context

A daily word puzzle lives or dies on the quality of its word list. Vowel Thief strips the vowels from common words (STRGGL, PPRTNTY) and players race the clock to rebuild them. Unlike Wordle or Spelling Bee, it rewards reading speed and pattern recognition rather than vocabulary size, so a fast reader of 12 can beat an English professor.

Challenge

Produce hundreds of daily puzzles without a human checking every one, and without letting a bad word or broken pack reach players. With only consonants on screen, one bad entry does more damage than in most word games: a skeleton has to lead to exactly one fair answer, and an obscure word or proper noun makes the whole puzzle feel rigged.

Approach

A programmatic content pipeline: a 370,000-word dictionary is filtered for frequency, collisions and proper nouns down to a validated pool of about 9,000 words. Each generated pack is gated by an independent validator before it can be scheduled.

Architecture

• Pipeline: Python
• App: Flutter
• Distribution: App Store (as Vowel Thief) and Google Play (as Vowel Heist)
• Backend: Firebase

Outcome

Shipped through App Store and Google Play review, with Adventure Mode now live alongside the daily puzzle.

Lessons

To be updated.