3 All-Nighters, a Handful of Coins, and My First Mobile Game
I haven’t had a proper night of sleep since Friday evening.
It is Sunday night now. The house is completely quiet, and I am sitting here staring at a completed .aab file ready for closed testing.
Turning thirty does strange things to your head. Here in India, reaching this milestone comes with an unspoken weight: you have your daily routine, family expectations, work, and responsibilities. Then one random day, an existential crisis quietly creeps in. You sit down after work and wonder what you are actually leaving behind that is entirely your own. Some people go out and try to reinvent their lifestyle. Being an ambivert who mostly keeps to himself, my reaction was to shut the bedroom door and spend seventy-two straight hours building a mobile puzzle game from scratch.
By God’s grace, by Sunday night, Coin Seek was finished.
The Spark: What My Wife Taught Me About Logic Puzzles
I do not play games much myself. But my wife plays them constantly.
Because we are currently long-distance, our daily evening calls often involve catching up while she unwinds with daily number deduction grids, grid puzzles, and nonograms. Listening to her explain how she worked through a tricky board got me curious about the underlying mathematics. There is a quiet beauty in that moment when logical constraints prove that a cell must be occupied, leaving zero room for doubt.
When life feels confusing, clean logic is therapeutic. It gave me the urge to build a game based on that exact deductive loop, but centered around physical coins and color zones.
The rules of Coin Seek are simple to understand, but strict:
- Double Tap for Coins: When deduction tells you a coin is hidden under a tile, double tap to lock it in.
- Single Tap or Drag to Eliminate: Tap or swipe across empty tiles to pencil in an X and cross out impossible spots.
- The Core Constraints: There is strictly only 1 coin allowed per row, 1 coin per column, and 1 coin per color region.
- No Neighbor Touching: Coins cannot touch each other, not even diagonally.
The rules sound straightforward, but writing an engine that generates a unique, mathematically solvable puzzle every single time without forcing the player to guess was an exhausting challenge.
Building from Scratch: Relying on C/C++ Foundations
Because this was my first game, I did not want layers of unnecessary engine bloat getting between the player and the experience. My natural instinct from working with low-level C and C++ is to treat every interaction like a deterministic state machine.
Rather than scattering logic across visual editor nodes or relying on loose scripting, the entire core loop is compiled directly into native C++:
- Zero Input Latency: Touch transitions, swipe-dimming gestures, and double-tap coin commitments are evaluated instantly in native memory before passing draw commands down to the render tree.
- Immediate State Resolution: Board evaluation, dynamic palette generation, cell style mutations, and region sweeps run through compiled native evaluators with minimal memory allocations.
- Offline and Self-Contained: Everything runs locally on the device. State persistence, haptics, level progression, and audio routing operate entirely offline with zero background network overhead tracking your moves.
Approaching the game with a low-level systems engineering mindset meant that even on an affordable Android phone, inputs feel instantaneous, particle sweeps trigger cleanly, and the board remains completely responsive without chewing through battery life.
Saturday Night: When My Wife Rescued the Visuals
By late Saturday night, the core logic was rock solid, but visually the game looked completely dull. Gray tiles, dark outlines, flat static background. It looked more like a data entry screen than an engaging puzzle.
I shared my screen with my wife on a video call, and she gave me an honest reality check:
“Why does it look so lifeless? When someone is solving a puzzle, the screen should feel responsive, like the atmosphere is clearing up as you make progress.”
That feedback completely changed the visual feel of the game:
- The Dynamic Background: Instead of a static, sterile backdrop, we built an ambient canvas designed to make solving puzzles feel calming. Soft, glowing stars drift gently upward, subtly shimmering and breathing in scale against the board. In dark mode, they cast soft pastel tones that complement the dark tiles; switching to light mode shifts the environment to rich jewel tones bordered by a gentle vignette. When you drag across the screen to mark tiles, the background responds with tactile parallax depth, easing naturally back into position when you let go. During key puzzle moments, the backdrop briefly breathes with warm color pulses, transforming what could have felt like an intimidating logic grid into a relaxing space.
- The App Icon: Neither of us are graphic designers or digital artists. I needed an icon that communicated coins and deduction clearly without looking cheap. We iterated through prompt ideas using an AI image generator to establish the coin texture and lighting, then brought the image into vector software to manually cut out the assets, clean the borders, and build the adaptive icon layers for Android. Being honest about using AI for early concept art matters: for a solo developer working through the night, it made shipping a clean icon possible.
The Ad Philosophy: Respecting the Player
The number one complaint my wife has always shared about free-to-play mobile games is aggressive advertising. You solve a puzzle in twenty seconds, and immediately an unskippable thirty-second video ad takes over your screen with a hidden close button. It ruins your focus completely.
Since Coin Seek is free, I integrated ads to cover basic developer overhead, but with strict personal rules:
- No Mid-Game Popups: You will never see an ad interrupt your thinking while you are actively working through a grid.
- Natural Pauses Only: Ads only show up at logical milestones after you complete boards, and they are capped so you spend your time actually solving puzzles instead of waiting on countdown timers.
- Full Offline Play: If you turn on airplane mode or play during a train commute with patchy network coverage, the game never nags or blocks you. The local puzzle engine runs entirely on your device.
Sunday Midnight: The Finish Line
Spending an entire weekend building a game from scratch is a strange way to work through an existential crisis, but seeing a project go from a blank file on Friday night to a working build on Sunday night is deeply grounding. There were multiple points around 2:30 AM where color-region validation edge cases broke the board generator and I questioned why I was doing this to myself.
Seeing the grid generate cleanly, feeling the haptic feedback when you double tap to place the final coin, and watching the ambient stars drift across the background made every lost hour of sleep worth it.
Coin Seek is entering closed testing on Android now. If you enjoy pure logic puzzles with zero fluff, I hope you give it a try when it launches publicly.
Now it is time to finally get some sleep.