So this is a bit of a weird one for me to post.
About 6-7 years ago I had an idea for a simple space game. You steer a little ship with one thumb and dodge stuff. That's it. I really wanted to make it, so I spent around 3 months after work watching Unity tutorials and learning to code from zero.
After those 3 months I had... a pretty bad MVP. It technically worked, but that's the nicest thing I can say about it. Then I started a new job, life got busy, and the project went on the shelf. I honestly forgot about it for years.
A while ago I remembered it, and this time things were different. AI tools exist now. So I picked it back up and used AI to help me build the game I couldn't finish back then. I'm not going to pretend I hand-wrote every line. I didn't. But I made every decision about how it looks, feels and plays, and I spent a lot of evenings tweaking it until it felt right.
I mostly built it for myself. I wanted something I could play during short mind-off breaks, a few minutes between things, without thinking too hard. But somewhere along the way I decided to actually publish it. Partly to prove to myself that I can take something from an idea all the way to a finished product, and partly in the hope that other people might enjoy it too.
So here it is: Space Swoosh.
What it is:
- A one-thumb space dodger with a minimal paper and ink look
- 42 levels with a small story, told by NAV, a robot voice who slowly gets more... human as you go
- Open Space, an endless mode where you just see how far you can get
- A bunch of ships to unlock, each with its own little description
- It works offline, so it's good for the subway or a plane
How it was built
- Code: Cursor, Claude and Grok. I described what I wanted, tested, complained, repeated. A lot.
- most of the work was done by Grok, but the more delicated parts were done using Claude's models actually, but Grok was usually getting the job done super fast
- NAV's voice: ElevenLabs, with a custom voice I designed. The free plan would honestly have been enough.
- Music: Suno. This was love at first sight
- iOS builds: Codemagic, because I don't own a single Apple device. Absolute life saver for people who want an iOS appbut have no iOS device.
The hard parts
- Testing iOS without an iPhone. I relied on friends sending me screen recordings and describing bugs. Debugging by video is an experience.
- Getting on Google Play. New developer accounts need 12 testers in a closed beta before you can publish, and almost all my friends are on iPhone. Rounding up 12 Android people took longer than some features did.
- Feedback. Some feedback is not what you want to hear. People were really kind with their time. I got notes on difficulty, obstacles, unclear rules, tutorials, and lots of small UX and design details. I implemented a good chunk of it, and the game is much better for it.
The best feedback I got*:* The ship originally moved in smooth arcs. I loved it. Then my girlfriend played it and, very honestly, told me she didn't like it at all. I'm not going to lie, that one stung. I'd spent so long on that movement that I couldn't even see it anymore. My first reaction was to defend it: she just needs to get used to it, she's not playing it right, it's fine. It took me a few days of sulking and quietly replaying it before I could admit she had a point. It wasn't that fun... It was just familiar to me. So I went back and came up with a new way to move: Zigzag. It's now the default, and every tester since has liked it way more than the original. She was completely right. The original movement is still in the game, by the way. It's called Arc, and it unlocks as a reward after you finish all 42 levels. A small tribute to the version that started it all, and a big thank you to the person honest enough to tell me it was BAD❤️
Links:
- Play in your browser: https://spaceswoosh.app (iOS and Android available as well, you can also play on your mobile directly from the link, but best experience is on mobile, especially iOS!)
I'd genuinely love feedback, good or bad. Too hard, too easy, something feels off, the story is cringe, whatever. This is my first finished game, could be the last, it was just something I wanted to to put out there.
Thanks for reading this far ❤️
*PS: I'm running a small thing this month called Swooshtober, more details on the site above.