Zavrzlama — A Croatian Daily Word Game for Android & iOS
Zavrzlama is a daily word game in Croatian — five games in one app, with a new edition every morning. It is not a translated global puzzle but content written for the language itself: diacritics, cases, and words people here actually use. An in-house project by Designer 2 j.d.o.o. — from the dictionary and the puzzle generators through the design and the Android and iOS code to release on Google Play and Apple's App Store.
The idea is that one morning takes about ten minutes: you solve five small games, see how many days you have in a row, and close the app. Everything is prepared in advance — 365 editions per game — so it runs with no network connection and no sign-up.
- Crossword — a daily 5×5 and a weekly 9×9, with every clue written by hand in Croatian
- Associations — sixteen terms in four columns and one final answer
- Where is the word from — one word, four regions, fifteen seconds to place it
- Letters — seven letters in a hive; how many words can you build
- Word search — twelve words hidden in a single theme that is only revealed at the end
- An archive of 365 editions per game, day streaks, statistics and average times
- One daily reminder at a time you pick yourself, silent, plus a home-screen widget
- Light and dark theme, or whatever the system is set to
- Works offline and without registration; your progress stays on the device
- Zavrzlama Plus removes the ads and opens the full archive and statistics — €4.99 a year or €9.99 forever
I ran the whole cycle on this one myself: the market and source-licence research, the crossword format and its measurements, the content generators, the interface design and typography, the Kotlin and Swift code for both apps, the widget and the daily notification, the ad and subscription integration, the screenshots and copy for both stores, shooting and cutting the ad, and finally the release and follow-up on Google Play and the App Store.
Technologies: Android — Kotlin 2.1, Jetpack Compose and Material 3 with custom design tokens, DataStore, WorkManager for the daily notification, Glance for the widget, kotlinx.serialization, Google Play Billing 8 and Google Mobile Ads (AdMob), minSdk 26 / targetSdk 36. iOS — Swift and SwiftUI (iOS 17+), @Observable, WidgetKit, StoreKit 2, Google Mobile Ads, XcodeGen and xcodebuild. Content — the hunspell hr_HR dictionary (53,661 entries, MPL 1.1) and the OpenSubtitles frequency list (MIT), with in-house generators written in Python.
Download on the App Store (iOS) Get it on Google Play (Android)
