This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Chris Crabtree wanted to teach his teenage daughter to code. What he got was an indie iOS game, "Gnomium," which combines Scrabble, match-games like "Candy Crush" and — as the title suggests — gnomes.

The mobile version of the game, "Gnomium: Pocket Edition," launches Wednesday, Jan. 13, on the Apple store. (Crabtree also is developing a version for Mac and PC, "Gnomium: Rocky Woodlands.") In the mobile edition, players move letters with Scrabble-like points around a grid to form words, then try to bunch those words together to form groups of words and score points.

Game development was never Crabtree's day job. But the Orem programmer and entrepreneur, like a growing number of game developers, had a creative itch to make something of his own.

"So I relearned a lot of that math and started reading books and building something, and thought: 'Hey, if I'm going to do this, why don't I involve my daughter Ashleigh?'" he said. In spring 2014, she was 14 and into computers. "So we kind of sat down and thought, OK, let's build a game together. Let's design something, come up with a clever idea, and then I'll teach [her] how to program, and we'll just do it side by side."

That summer, Ashleigh spent evenings sitting by her dad in their home office and talking about ideas they had for the game.

"He would show me the different things he had done to change the game and how he did it," she said. "I had taken an introductory course to coding not long before so I somewhat knew what was going on. I just remember it being so fun to realize that if I had a cool idea, I could actually act on it and see it created."

As the game came along, school started again and Ashleigh became too busy to keep working on the project.

Crabtree continued and a year and a half later, he has "Gnomium." The puzzle game still has his daughter's fingerprints: A special feature in the game — which, in part, was her idea — inserts the words that players find into a colorful ad-lib that they can then share online. Crabtree shared some test examples through the game's Twitter account, such as:

"I cook everything with crow. Fewer calories."

"I'm Weekman and you're Toewoman. Let's fight cakes together!"

"OK, I declare today as every-lie-is-deep day."

(Crabtree acknowledges that the "AlphaBear" game beat them to the punch, but he and Ashleigh came up with it about two years ago.)

And if the art of "Gnomium" looks familiar, the animated gnomes and their colorful world are courtesy Roland Vinh, a Belgian artist who was the art director of Rovio Star's award-winning "Tiny Thief" game. But "Gnomium's" simple, cartoon aesthetic wasn't easy to design, with the super-quick gameplay in mind.

"A simple design is never easy to achieve," Vinh said. "It has to be visually attractive, while also very readable, because the player has to recognize quickly each item so that his mind can solely be dedicated to the gameplay."

Vinh is also working with Crabtree on "Gnomium: Rocky Woodlands," which Crabtree hopes to release later this year. Though the game has evolved a lot from the prototype, Ashleigh said she loves what it's become. Lately, she's had to focus on school and sports more than coding, but she would love to get back into it someday.

Until then, she's beating her neighbors' high scores.

Twitter: @MikeyPanda