I shipped Gapshot a few weeks ago. It's a small iOS arcade game one tap, rotating rings, you try to thread a dot through a gap. Miss once and it's over.
I've been putting off writing this because I wasn't sure what to say that wasn't just marketing. But the honest version is more interesting, so here goes.
The thing I kept noticing
I got frustrated with mobile games. Not in a dramatic way — I love games, grew up on them but in a specific, quiet way that built up over time.
Almost every successful mobile game I looked at was optimized for the same thing: keeping you playing. Lives that refill after 30 minutes. Streaks that punish you for missing a single day. Difficulty walls placed suspiciously close to a paywall. Push notifications that pretend to be urgent.
The actual game, buried in there somewhere.
Engagement and enjoyment aren't the same thing.
That thought kept coming back. And once I noticed it, I couldn't stop noticing it.
What I wanted to build
The opposite of that.
Something where the game is the game — no systems layered on top of it to manufacture reasons to come back. No timers. No artificial friction. Just a thing you could open, play for three minutes, feel something, and close.
The mechanic clicked pretty fast: a dot, a ring with one gap, one tap. The skill is timing. You get better at it or you don't. There's nothing else pulling at your attention.
No lives. No energy. No "come back in 4 hours to claim your reward." You open it, you play, you're done.
I called it Gapshot.
So what actually happened
Early on the feedback was mostly good — people liked the feel of it, the clean look, the fact that it didn't ask anything of them. That part landed.
But I also got what I knew was coming: it's too hard.
My first move was to tweak the numbers. Slow the rings down a little. Widen the gap. But every time I did that, it felt off — like the thing that made it satisfying was leaking out. The whole point is that you have to actually pay attention. Take that away and it's just tapping a screen.
So I stopped trying to make it easier and tried to figure out what was actually wrong.
The real problem
It wasn't difficulty. It was that there was no way to practice a specific level without replaying everything before it.
There's a gap no pun intended — between understanding what a game wants from you and actually being able to do it. For Gapshot that gap is timing. Players could see what they needed to do. They just couldn't do it yet, and every failed attempt cost them their run.
They were burning out before they ever got enough reps to build any feel for it.
Practice mode
So I built a way to jump directly to any level.
In normal play you work your way up — each level is faster, harder, and you have to earn your way there. Practice mode removes that gate. You can go straight to level 8, or level 15, or wherever you keep dying, and just sit there and work on it without having to replay everything before it first.
No score. No consequence. No progress at stake. Just you and whichever level is giving you trouble.
I almost didn't ship it. Felt like it was admitting the game was too hard, or that it was "for people who couldn't handle it." That framing was wrong. Practice mode isn't for people who can't play the game — it's for people who want to get good at it, which is everyone who comes back more than once.
Reducing friction isn't the same as reducing difficulty. A steep curve with no on-ramp is just frustrating. The same curve with a way in is a challenge worth trying.
Where things are now
Still early. Still figuring things out.
The leaderboard is in. Daily challenge is in. Practice mode is in. There are probably ten things I'll look back on and cringe at, but that's where it lives right now.
Building this in public means finding out where your assumptions were wrong usually right after you ship. That's uncomfortable and also kind of the point.
If you want to follow along, I'll keep writing here about what changes, what breaks, and what I learn from it.
And if you want to try the game, it's on the App Store. Come find the gap.
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