DEV Community: Kat

I Made A Silly Postcard Gamapp for my Friends and it's Kinda Cute

Kat — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 03:12:59 +0000

This is a submission for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Community

Note: I edited it after the deadline because I don't know why, my embed link to my repository shows up as a sign in link for Gitlab, despite it being the correct link.

The Community

Alright, where's the piece of paper I wrote my mission statement on. So. I built Tiny Postcards for me and my friends! They are my community, and I love them dearly. For the most part, we met in the French equivalent of college, and the others are current and former PhD students. Sadly (this is where I start the sales pitch) I feel like adult life is pulling us all in different directions, and although I still speak with some of them daily, others are growing a bit distant through no fault of their own. It's just life!

And I feel like, I don't know why, maybe it's just how our society sees relationships or maybe I'm just an introvert, it's not super common for people to be comfortable with just sending a message saying "Hey, I thought about you today!". Most people would feel pressured to answer and have a conversation, or maybe it'd be seen as weird, but either way, most people will just let friendships fade even when they still think about the other person from time to time.

So yeah, I decided to build for groups of friends, young adults in particular, who'd like to keep contact in a low-pressure, lighthearted way with their friends. But even though I think it's a real issue, the app is mostly just for fun because I really like sending and receiving letters in Animal Crossing.

What I Built

And this is where Tiny Postcards come in! Think about it. Postcards are the ultimate form of one-sided communication. What does a postcard mean? "I was having a good time and yet you were on my mind." But no one answers postcards. No one even writes important things on them! The love is in the fact that the person spent a lot of time choosing the ugliest one from the store.

I sadly didn't get to design ugly postcards. But just use your imagination. Next time you go to the store, just look at them. Graphic design is always someone's passion.

I built the app entirely on my own, with no AI agent/LLM-generated code or external weirdly supportive IDE. And I took some time to play Hearthstone, so I had to sacrifice some planned features for that. However, you can:

Write postcards, including choosing who you're sending them to, an image, and writing the text.
Receive postcards other people sent you through the clever mechanism described above.
Read said postcards from your mailbox, with a little notification dot (??) when you have new postcards.
Peruse your collection of postcards.

Yeaaaaah sorry, the big "Today's Postcard" thing doesn't do anything. It's like, five lines of code, but I just didn't have the time.

I also didn't fix a "bug" that makes it so that your username in the corkboard is always "Kat". Don't laugh but I only tested with my own name until the end.

Demo

There's an APK in the git repository below, with instructions on how to run the server locally, but here's a video too.

Code

https://gitlab.com/kataraxie-jams/postcards-app

I think I messed up when I initially moved the Unity project in a sub-directory, so don't mind the bloat at the root of the project.

How I Built It

Devlog

I honestly think the code is... alright. Code-wise, this is a very small project. The main difficulty was that I don't really know how to do server stuff (I know the basics, but I don't have a ready to use stack and I've never deployer anything in my life).

So the first day was entirely setting up the Python server and interfacing with Unity (learning how to do requests and use JSON).

On the second day I did the logic (sending postcards and receiving them), and here's a sneak peak of what the app looked like in the middle of the afternoon on the 28th. I'm almost considering removing this screenshot altogether because it's not centered and I don't like it.

The end of the second day was entirely spent in Krita and Pinterest trying to figure out how to design something that's half a game and half an app, and then drawing the assets.

Today (the third day), I set up all of the scenes, with the correct assets, etc... then I implemented some small features such as rotating the cards and changing the image, as well as the corkboard.

Technologies

I have a terrible secret to share with you.

I don't know how to code apps... I mean, I did a bit of React + Node.JS a few years ago? I have no idea how to deploy a database and connect to it and the authentification and all. I know I could get a backend-as-a-service and/or ask an AI to do everything for me but I don't like that :))))

So I just decided to take what I knew (Unity) and to only step out of my confort zone a bit with a small Python server.

So yeah, the app is coded with Unity, and the backend is a Flask Python server, but I feel like it's the fourth time I say so.

Hmmm I think that's it.

Oh yeah, I used AI too! I asked Claude what would be a good solution for the server side with Unity, and it said Supabase, but it was too much for me, so it suggested Firebase, and then I said "what about a local Python server" and it suggested Flask + just the native Unity HTTP requests. Then I asked it why its example code was different from the Unity Documentation and it explained. And that's it for AI use? It helped me go through the unknown unknown phase of solutions for the backend, so for that it was kinda nice. But if I hadn't suggested the local server myself, I don't know if it would have.

Thank you so much for reading through my entry! If you like my work, consider following me here and commenting, and here's my Substack if you want to follow along my (game)dev adventures. I'm looking to connect with, let's say, AI-careful gamedevs out there, but everyone's welcome.

A 6 Years Old Phone Named "Evil Little Woodpecker" Ruined my Evening

Kat — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:36:33 +0000

Guys. Urgh.

I was supposed to work on the DEV weekend challenge. I was setting up a local webserver to test things out, and needed to forward a port. I log in to the admin panel of my router.

And what do I see there?

A ******** phone connected to my router. And it's been here for a month. And it's named "Evil Little Woodpecker", which is a SUPER WEIRD NAME if you ask me.

I freak out a bit, like anyone would, I think. The phone cannot be pinged from a PC, but neither can mine. I know basically nothing about cybersecurity, it's really not my domain, so excuse any non-expert language in this post, and please teach me things in the comments.

Phase 1: Diagnosis

I start monitoring all the packages that are transitting through my internet box, and that goddamn phone is not sending a single package, so either it's obfuscating its package info (?) or it's just listening. But if it's just spoofing my packages, why is it showing as connected while when I do it, my machine doesn't?

I tried using my phone to triangulate the unwelcome bird using the RSSI. Either it was approximately in my bedroom, or it was upstairs in my neighbors' flat. But how did they get the password? Did they manage to trigger the WPA authentication remotely? Did they sneak in while I was emptying the trashcan?

Of course, I could've kicked the phone at any moment, but at this point I just wanted to know what was going on. I tried to ping it again, from my router this time. Nothing. But pinging my phone works, so the thing is purposefully blocking pings. The hypothesis of a malicious agent gets more and more likely, and I'm sweating buckets.

And then, not even a minute after I tried to ping it, the phone disappears.

Phase 2: Panic

My dear guys and gals and all in between, when I say that I was ready to go back to the stone age and run a silex knife through the heart of every single working device in my house, I mean it.

I changed every single password I could think about and deactivated WPA. I cancelled all plans to open any port for even a local test server. I kinda wanted to cry.

In a last ditch effort to restore a semblance of normalcy, I send a message to a friend that came over earlier in the day (even though the device was connected since last month). Funnily enough, they had almost exactly the same phone model than the intruder, but it was not named "Evil Little Woodpecker" and, they assured me, they never connected to my WiFi.

And then, another friend joined the call. "Evil Little Woodpecker?" they said. "That sounds like something T. would name his phone."

My first friend chimed in. "Didn't T. and B. came over last month?" Sure, they did.

Phase 3: Relief and Disbelief

I slammed the metaphorical door of the vocal chan open. "T., I said. I'm seeking damages for what you did to my psyche tonight."

T. did find that funny, but that's because we weren't in the same room.

Yeah, long story short, T. did come over exactly on the date the strange phone first connected to the router, and his phone is named Evil Little Woodpecker, which is still extremely weird, although it's now on the funny side of weird because it's not someone trying to man-in-the-middle me.

And my box just decided that it liked it. My box liked Evil Little Woodpecker. It gave it a special spot in its heart and never realized it was long gone, even as I refreshed the panel every five seconds. Only when I tried to ping the bird did it manage to update its status.

All of that for naught.

I hope at least you'll find it a bit funny. I know my colleagues are going to laugh at me, but I don't really care because I'm very relieved.

So yeah, sorry, Ms. Honey. I did do my homework, but an Evil Little Woodpecker ate it.

— Kat

Did you find that story funny? Yeah? Did you laugh at my misery? Do you think that makes you a good human being? Anyway, good and bad people are welcome to follow me on Substack for more content!

Cover picture by Łukasz Rawa on Unsplash

From Dev to Gamedev: How I Speedran Learning How to Make Video Games

Kat — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:51:49 +0000

My first attempt at learning how to make video games was at 15 years old. I downloaded Unity, looked up an incomprehensible French tutorial with a disastrous audio quality, and promptly decided that it wasn’t for me.

Seven years later, in 2022, with a computer engineering degree in hand, I tried again. But this time, I wasn’t alone. I had two major advantages:

A boyfriend who had a degree in video game development, and had worked in an indie studio for a bit.
A few gamejams under my belt, but purely as an artist.

In 2022 and 2023, my friends and I entered five gamejams, during which I didn’t write a line of code. It made me fall in love with the format, and I wanted more. So, interestingly enough, I didn’t learn gamedev to create a dream game or with the idea of making commercial games.

No, I just followed the first assignment of my then-boyfriend’s very first course on Unity and learned about the Inspector, GameObjects, the very basics of ECS (Entity Component Script), and the old Input System. It took me about an hour to make a cube that spun when I pressed E and that I could move around like a barbarian by modifying the Transform directly.

I then clapped my hands, and happily declared that I was ready for my first solo gamejam.

Let me tell you, I learned more in the week-end I tried to cobble a game together than I would’ve in weeks of tutorials. Here’s what the game looked like:

All the text is handwritten, except for the score that’s the default Unity font because I didn’t have the time to figure out how fonts worked. The assets were supposed to be placeholders, but of course I didn’t have the time to make final assets. I haven’t looked at the project since 2022 and I’m pretty sure I would cry if I did.

Sadly, I can’t let you play it because I thought it was very smart to plaster my real name on it and I don’t think we’re that close yet, with this being my first post and all. Stick around and maybe, if you ask nicely, I’ll repackage it.

But overall, it was not a bad gamejam game at all! It had a title screen, a victory and a defeat screen, a simple gameplay and a clear goal. Actually, it ended up being better than some of my later games simply because of how limited I was by my own abilities. But that’s a topic for another day and another post.

This looks like a good timing to tell you that if you like my content, you can follow me here and subscribe to me for free on Substack!

Compared to my spinning cube, this game taught me:

How to instantiate GameObjects (and thus, use prefabs).
A tiny bit of UI.
Colliders (these were a big hurdle, especially figuring out the static vs. dynamic interactions).
Very basic scene management.

It didn’t have any sound at all, which many people mentioned, but overall I had very encouraging comments, and I was super happy about it! I ranked 35th out of 145, which is not a bad result at all for a first time solo jammer (if you feel otherwise, feel free to drop a formal duel request in the comments, and we shall fight for my honor).

This first experience cemented that gamejams are super duper cool, and so is having a friend with some experience who can help you. I also want to talk about it in the future, but I found back then that Unity ressources for people who know how to code were scarce. I wouldn’t have had the patience to sit through another tutorial that treats opening Visual Studio and writing a for loop like a death sentence. I didn’t know C#, but I knew C++ and OOP in general. I just needed someone to fast track me to the specifics of C# and Unity.

So yeah, I kept entering gamejams and learning more and more, making bigger and bigger games (sometimes too ambitious) and feeling more and more confident in my abilities.

In the following three years, from late 2022 to now, I submitted 13 other games to various gamejams. Four made it to the top 10, and two to the podium (out of ~150 games each time). I also got started on maybe half a dozen other games I didn’t submit for various reasons. I streamed gamedev on Twitch for a few months as I waited to start my PhD, working on Trijams (a weekly 3 hours jam) while chatting with people.

I’m debating whether to explain in detail here how amazing gamejams are to work out your gamedev muscles, but I think it’d be a bit much for a first time. I know myself, I could write a 10k post without realizing it, and this one doesn’t even have subtitles, so it’d be a nightmare for you.

But in the meantime, you can check some of the games I released myself on my public itch.io page, if you are curious. Some of my games are in restricted, but I’m planning on making them available again in the future, as I mentioned before.

Overall, I had a hell of a good time¹. 10/10 would recommand.

And now, by starting this blog, I hope to bring you along me in my jam adventures! I will share devlogs, gamejam tips that go beyond “get enough sleep” and “small scope”, and talk about gamedesign, and development methodologies, and how they differ between big, commercial projects and jams. I’ve been reading and consuming a lot of content on game design, pedagogy, and fun, and did a lot of thinking, too. You might find that I have a few interesting things to say. Or maybe I’m overpromising, but either way, you’ll have to stick around to find out.

Thanks for reading to the end, drop a like and a comment (I’ve always wanted to say/write that, I don’t really use social media) and I’ll see you next time. Uhhh there should be an actionable takeaway at the end of this post or something. If you’re learning game development, enter a gamejam. Any jam. Here’s the link to itch.io’s jams. Choose one and do it, make a game. Tell me about it. I’ll know if you didn’t.

And if you’re already a gamejam aficionado, send this to that one friend who’s been watching tutorials for ages, so that they see the light and you can do jams together.

See you!

— Kat

Am I talking about the gamejams? Am I talking about writing the article? Am I being deliberately vague? We may never know. ↩