Letterpress, Game From the Creator of Tweetie, Lifts Off

These days, iPhone games are a dime a dozen. But every so often, one breaks free from the masses and begins to generate a bit of buzz. That's the story around Letterpress, a clever new word game for the iPhone and iPad, which is already creeping up the iTunes charts and has been downloaded around 60,000 times during its first day.

Letterpress is the newest creation from Loren Brichter, a 27-year-old app developer living in Philadelphia. Mr. Brichter is well known among mobile circles as the man behind Tweetie, a beautiful and simple Twitter client for the iPhone. Twitter snapped up the company back in 2010, and brought Mr. Brichter into the fold to help develop and release Twitter clients for the iPad and the Mac.

Mr. Brichter left Twitter almost a year ago to start working on personal projects.

Letterpress, he said, started off “as a fun side project to scratch an itch.”

The idea for the game began to gestate a few months ago when he and his w ife were waiting for a table for dinner. They simultaneously pulled out their phones and began playing a game called Spelltower.

“The game is single-player, so we were both standing there playing it and I thought, well, maybe I should make something that we can both play,” he said.

He worked through several versions of the game before settling on the current version, which challenges players to create words and claim as much of the board as they can in their color.

“The mechanics evolved like crazy,” he said. “I only knew it would be around color and words.”

Originally, he said, it wasn't his intention to build a game. “But I thought this would be a way to explore a different side of the App store, one that I don't have experience with. I've never released something for free that has in-app purchases, but that's the most popular way to release software now.”

The initial version of the game is free, but players can upgrade for 99 cents to a version that will let them choose different color schemes and play more than two games concurrently.

Mr. Brichter has become well known in mobile circles for novel gestures and sleek interfaces that become popular and are echoed across other applications and services. He developed the “pull-to-refresh” action, among others. He said he had embedded Letterpress with a few new motions and design tweaks that could become as popular.

“When you get an alert in the game, you can swipe down to fling it offscreen, instead of pushing cancel,” he said. “Little things like that might catch on.”

Mr. Brichter hopes the game will become a hit. He has a few other ideas in the works, including another game, but he plans to continue to work on Letterpress.

“It all depends on whether this sticks,” he said. “The chances of having a successful game right out of the gate are zero, unless you're a company like Rovio, but I'm going to focus on th is for a while and then see what's next.”