u/taiomi

What it is: BOOP! Point your phone at any dog or cat. It works out the breed on the device, cuts the animal out of the photo into a beautiful die-cut sticker, and pins it to a map where you met them. A Pokédex for pets that you actually meet. Free, no account, nothing leaves the phone.

I built it because the best part of any walk is meeting somebody's dog!

Where it is now: out for 2 days, 99 downloads, and the thing I did not expect is a user in Vietnam who found it on their own. 5% of anything it makes goes to UK animal welfare charities, published publicly, including the months where the amount is nothing.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6794737842

Happy to answer anything about the project!

Solo dev launch.

Just released GameDen, an iOS app I built solo over the last several weeks that bundles 110+ small games. Card, puzzle, arcade, board, racing, word games, plus daily challenges.

Scope-wise it sounds insane on paper but in practice it was the opposite as over the past 12 years I have felt each game was small enough to feel completed in a sitting or two, which is exactly why I never burnt out.

What worked for keeping the scope manageable as one person:

• Shared haptics, shared leaderboard code. Wrote each once.
• Per-game state was always a single ObservableObject, and never let any one game justify a heavier state stack.
• Picked the most boring stack (SwiftUI, UIKit + SpriteKit) as a challenge as I wanted to really push it to its limits
• Each game got a "good enough to ship" cutoff. The game polish only happened after the game was on disk and playable end-to-end.

What I'd do differently:

• I should have really documented the process of building the app, its been an emotional rollercoaster and I wish I had something I could look back in the future and maybe something to help/ inspire people to do the same.

DOWNLOAD GAMEDEN

Happy to answer anything about staying solo at this scope, or anything related! I am an open book!

Hey everyone! I'm a solo indie developer and I've just released and update to my app GameDen its packed with over 85 casual mini games you can play entirely offline.

What's in it?
Everything from classics like Snake, 2048, and Sudoku to other games like Fruit Slicer, Ball Jump, Hex Merge, and more. There's puzzles, brain teasers, action games, trivia and something for every mood.

Why I built it
I wanted one app I could open when I'm on the train, waiting somewhere, or just have 2 minutes to kill, without needing wifi or sitting through loading screens. Every game is designed to be picked up and played instantly.

Features

85+ mini games in one app

Fully offline. No internet required

Game Center leaderboards & achievements

Daily streaks & play stats

Regular updates with new games

Same phone multiplayer games

I've been working on this for a while and would genuinely love to hear what you think. Happy to answer any questions about the games or the development process!

DOWNLOAD - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gameden-offline-games/id6761107495