I built a calm color-by-number game for my 8-year-old — no ads, no timers, no sign-up

Anh Dinh — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 18:54:09 +0000

My kid loves color-by-number apps, but every one we tried was packed with ads, "watch a video for more colors" prompts, timers, or "come back tomorrow" hooks. So I built my own: Color Quest (https://colorquestgame.com).

How it works: pick a pixel picture (animals, dinosaurs, space, treats, unicorns, holidays), tap a color, fill in the squares with that number. No timers, no lives, no losing progress — a wrong tap just gets a gentle hint. Coloring streaks earn "power tools" (paint brush, paint rain, a bomb that fills a patch). My kid is obsessed with the bomb.

How I built it: I paired Opus 5.5 for the heavy lifting (architecture, the gnarly puzzle-generation logic) with a local Qwen 3.8 running on my own GPUs for fast iteration — no API bills, no rate-limit waits. TypeScript + Vite, fully static site, zero backend. Domain was $10; total spend is basically the domain.

The best part: my 8-year-old was the PM. She doesn't type feedback — she just talks. Voice notes about which pictures she wanted, what felt boring, what was unfair — and I'd ship the next iteration. The bomb power tool exists because she demanded it.

A few things I cared about as a parent building for kids:

Photo-to-puzzle: turn the family pet or a drawing into a puzzle. The photo never leaves the device.
Print any picture and color it on paper.
Works offline once added to the Home Screen. No accounts, progress lives in the browser.
In Spanish and Vietnamese, since those are the languages in our house.

It's a hobby project — nothing to buy, I'm not selling anything. I'd love feedback from other parents (and builders who've shipped kids' products): what pictures would your kids want to color? And if you've ever marketed a kids' product with zero budget — what actually worked?

DEV Community: Anh Dinh

I built a calm color-by-number game for my 8-year-old — no ads, no timers, no sign-up