How I Built Two iOS Games in 3 Months as a Solo Developer

#gamechallenge #gamedev #ai #webdev

Hi, my name is Ri.
I'm a software developer, but I had never built a game before. No game dev experience, no Unity skills, nothing. Just curiosity and a decision to try.
Three months later I have two games live on the App Store. Here's what I actually did.

Why Not Unity?

Everyone says "use Unity for games." I tried. I spent time learning Unity, went through tutorials, understood the basics.

Then I made a decision — Unity is for my third game. Not the first.

Why? Because I already knew React Native. And the fastest way to ship is to use what you know. Unity has a steep learning curve and I wanted to actually finish something, not spend 6 months learning a new engine before writing a single line of game logic.

So I built both games in React Native. Yes, really.

The Two Games

Linko: One Line Path — a minimalist puzzle game. You connect all dots on a grid using one continuous line. Sounds simple. Gets brutal fast. 5x5 grids for beginners, up to 9x9 for expert. 5000+ levels total.

Bricko: Brick Photo Art — you build pictures brick by brick, like pixel art. Each picture is a grid of colored bricks you place one by one. Relaxing, satisfying, visual.

Both are casual. Both are simple in concept. That was intentional.

What Was Actually Hard

Puzzle generation for Linko. Generating valid one-line path puzzles that are solvable but not trivial took the most time. I had to make sure every level actually has a solution before it shows up to the player.

Performance. React Native is not a game engine. Rendering hundreds of brick cells smoothly in Bricko required optimization I didn't expect. Flatlist tuning, memoization, reducing re-renders — all of that became real work.

Publishing to App Store

This part surprised me with how much time it takes. Screenshots, metadata, age ratings, review guidelines — Apple is detailed. My first submission got rejected for a minor reason. Fixed it, resubmitted, approved.

The whole process from first submission to live on store took about a week.

What I Would Do Differently

Start thinking about marketing on day one, not after launch. I built for 3 months and only started thinking about users after the apps were live. That's backwards. Build in public, share progress, get feedback early.