Most of what I write here is about software leadership — building teams, navigating organizations, thinking about how engineers grow. Today is different. Today I want to tell you about something I’m building.
Over the past several months, my company Alpine Blue has been working on Lamplit — a daily acrostic puzzle game for iPhone and iPad. We’re in early beta, and I wanted to share what it is, why we built it, and a few of the decisions that shaped it.
What’s an acrostic?
If you’ve never encountered the form, an acrostic is a word puzzle where you solve a series of clues — each answer is a word or phrase — and then the first letter of every answer, read top to bottom, spells a hidden word. That hidden word is the “spine.”
The double acrostic variant goes further: both the first and last letters of each answer contribute — spelling two words simultaneously, one down each edge of the grid. If you’ve ever solved one in The Atlantic or the Sunday newspaper, you know the particular satisfaction of watching a mystery word emerge letter by letter as you work through the clues.
Acrostics have a long history. The Victorian era loved them — they were a parlor game, a literary form, a way to hide messages in plain sight. We wanted to bring that warmth and wordplay to a modern mobile game.
What is Lamplit?
Lamplit is a daily acrostic puzzle game with a warm, unhurried aesthetic. Each day there’s one puzzle: single acrostics on weekdays, double acrostics on weekends. You solve it at your own pace — there are no timers, no streaks that punish a missed day, no ads.
The game ships with two clue modes:
- Modern mode gives you clean, direct clues. Clear, fair, and accessible.
- Classic mode reaches back to the Victorian tradition — cryptic, allusive, sometimes delightfully oblique. It unlocks after you’ve completed about 25 puzzles, which felt like the right moment: once you’ve internalized the structure of the puzzle, the puzzle itself can become more interesting.
The UI is dark-mode only, built around an amber and cream palette with New York serif typography throughout. The name comes from that aesthetic — the feeling of solving a puzzle by lamplight. Warm, focused, a little out of time.
The business model is a one-time purchase (roughly $4.99) rather than a subscription. We think word game fans are tired of paying indefinitely for content that should just be there. Optional themed puzzle packs and small consumable bundles (hint tokens, streak shields) let players support the game beyond the initial unlock, but nothing is gated behind a paywall that degrades the core experience.
Lamplit works fully offline. No account required to play.
A few decisions worth explaining
Why dark-mode only? It was an aesthetic choice first. The amber-on-dark palette is central to the feeling we wanted — something that genuinely looks and feels like lamplight. We didn’t want to compromise that with a light mode that would need its own palette design and feel like a different product. We may revisit this, but for now the constraint is also the identity.
Why Classic mode unlocks gradually? Victorian cryptic clues are genuinely harder. Not harder in a punishing way — harder in the way that a crossword clue with wordplay requires more fluency with the form than a straight definition. We didn’t want new players encountering Classic clues before they’d built up comfort with acrostics as a format. The unlock threshold is an invitation, not a gate.
Why SwiftUI and Swift 6? Partly because it’s the right tool for a new iOS app in 2026 — the framework has matured considerably and the concurrency model in Swift 6 is genuinely good. Partly because I find it interesting to work close to the platform when building something from scratch. SwiftData handles local persistence cleanly, and StoreKit 2 makes the in-app purchase flow about as simple as it can be.
Where things stand
Lamplit is in early beta. The core puzzle engine works. Daily delivery works. The purchase flow works. What we’re refining: puzzle content, clue quality, onboarding, and a handful of polish items that need more time in real players’ hands.
We’re not ready to announce a launch date. What we’re ready to do is start building a list of people who want to be notified when we go live.
Sign up for early access
If any of this sounds like something you’d enjoy — or if you know a word game enthusiast who might — head to lamplit.games and leave your email. We’ll reach out when the game is ready for the App Store.
I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about software from the outside. Building Lamplit has been a good reminder of why I got into this in the first place. I hope it’s something word game fans love.
If you have questions about the game, the tech, or the design decisions, leave a comment below — I’d enjoy the conversation.
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