September 8, 2025
Why a Word Game Has a Camera Button
Off-screen time, crayons, and why the photo import feature is my favorite thing I've built.
Here’s something I noticed when I watched my daughter use the early version of the game.
She would draw on the canvas — the digital one, with her finger on the screen — and it was fine. The drawings were decent. But there was something slightly deflated about it. She’d draw, and then she’d look at her phone the way she looked at her phone when she was scrolling. Present, but not fully present.
Then one day she grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil while we were playing. She drew the scene on paper — not in the app — and held it up to show us. The drawing was alive in a way the digital version wasn’t. Her hand made marks that were clearly, unmistakably hers. There were stray lines and corrections and a kind of energy that you can’t really fake on a touchscreen.
“I wish I could put this in the game,” she said.
It took me about four seconds to decide to build that.
The camera button — the little photo import feature in the drawing round — is technically simple. You tap it, your camera opens, you photograph whatever you’ve drawn, and it imports as your panel. That’s it. The game treats it exactly the same as a digital drawing.
But the implications are not simple.
The implications are: you can pick up actual crayons. Colored pencils. Watercolor. Markers on a paper grocery bag. A ballpoint pen on a napkin. You can draw in the physical world, with your hands, on paper, and that drawing becomes part of a digital comic strip that lives at a permanent URL and can be shared with anyone.
A child’s crayon drawing — wobbly lines, the colors slightly outside the edges, the sky that’s definitely a slightly wrong shade of blue — becomes part of something that lasts.
That matters to me for reasons that go beyond the app.
When my daughter draws on a screen, the drawing is on the screen. When she draws on paper, the paper exists. You can hold it. You can put it on the fridge. It has a physical reality that feels different. And when I think about what we’re actually trying to do here — create something that families make together and keep — I keep coming back to the paper.
The photo import feature is also, quietly, an off-screen time feature. If you draw on paper, your hands are off the screen. You’re doing something physical. The device is a tool you dip into briefly — to photograph your work, to see what everyone else drew — rather than the medium you’re living inside.
That’s a design choice I care about. Not because screens are bad, but because the moments that feel most alive in a family game aren’t usually the moments when everyone’s staring at their individual device. They’re the moments when someone holds up a piece of paper and everyone can see what’s on it.
The feature almost didn’t ship. There were technical complications with image sizing, with how the canvas handled imported photos, with making sure the preview looked right in the final comic. I spent a week on it that I hadn’t planned for.
But then I watched my daughter photograph one of her drawings — a proper drawing, done with colored pencils, a detailed castle with a dragon wearing reading glasses — and I watched it appear in the comic at the end, her handmade panel sitting next to the digitally drawn ones, clearly from a different world, clearly hers.
And I thought: yes. That’s the one. That’s the feature that makes this worth building.
Your crayon drawings deserve to be permanent.