Karen Jirak of the new BeeAppi games is not your typical games developer. A ten-year veteran of the software development world, Jirak was burning out and looking for a creative outlet.

“I wasn’t even an Apple person,” Jirak says, but after spending her tax return on her very first Mac, she turned her programming skills towards an iPhone game. Her first creation, CyberWord, is a candy-colored casual game, Bejeweled-meets-Boggle on the iPhone. Jirak doesn’t consider herself a gamer, although she admits to playing hours of that non-gamer’s favorite electronic game, Guitar Hero, and unplugged Boggle.

“Most word games simply ask the player to look at the screen,” Jirak says, “but CyberWord adds a more interactive dimension by asking players to touch letters, swipe words, and shake the phone.”

Jirak turned to her sister, Julie Schaffroth, a graphic designer, for the sweet anime-eyed animals that cheer players’ progress, and other design work. She also brought on boyfriend Jeremy Cid, as marketing director. (That’s right, the girl built the game and brought the guy on as booth babe. Told you this isn’t your typical dev team.)

I’ve said before that the best games use simple rules for various challenges. CyberWord keeps the play mechanic extra-simple, the better to introduce this game to mothers-in-law, co-workers and any other potential wordgame players. After mastering the basics of the word formation – touch to swap letters, swipe to make words, shake to rearrange the letter tiles – you have all the skills to play several different playmodes.

Challenge mode asks players to form 12 words from letter tiles before time runs out, with increasingly difficult levels. I didn’t actually make it to max level, but I imagine it’s an entire screen of Vs and Xs, like a bad Scrabble draw. Infinite mode adds a bomb, a familiar mechanic from match-3. Different colored tiles represent different point values, and a new Facebook Connect addition allows CyberWord players to show off amazing scores to their Facebook friends.

It’s hard to add anything new to the word game genre, but puzzle does a great job of mixing up the speedy, point-scoring word creation with a more strategic style. The untimed Puzzle mode asks players to turn as many letter tiles as possible into words (leave up to four behind to progress to the next level), without receiving any replacement letters. Jirak says that “there are no new ideas, just new combinations of ideas,” and the playstyles of CyberWord blend some of the best parts of Scrabble, Megatouch’s Wordster, match-3 games and Boggle.

With a low pricepoint ($0.99, or try the ad-supported CyberWord Lite free), an easy mechanic, and with the convenience of the omnipresent pocket platform of the iPhone, CyberWord is attracting fans of offline wordgames. CyberWord is built for a quick round while waiting for the train or the dentist, but the brain-tickling word formation quickly becomes addictive. Jirak and the rest of the BeeAppi teams are downloading new games and considering their next project, but we can be sure this is the first of many BeeAppi iPhone games.

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