The New York Times' Spelling Bee is a word game that a few people I know would post screenshots of and play collaboratively every day in their Discord server. I built a Discord bot that would automate the work of posting the puzzle each morning while also providing feedback and hints to make playing the game there more engaging. The result is a bot that currently runs in over 100 servers. I also created and published a Python library that makes creating and handling puzzle sessions easy.

I knew I wanted to create new graphics for the spelling bee puzzle; the basic task, which was to display seven letters in a way that emphasized one in particular, was open-ended and full of potential. Obviously, I had to make my designs programmatic. I ended up primarily either adding the letters to SVG files and rendering the results with the CairoSVG library, or consuming the JSON output of my 2.5D graphics app and using it to render a 3D image with the Python Imaging Library.

I also used C and Cython to create a Python module for this project that could efficiently store and load a trie that stored the set of all English words on Wiktionary, so that I could efficiently search for words that might exist according to some, and fit the puzzle's criteria, but that weren't officially considered puzzle answers.