Glimpse

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  AppIcon

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  1-Glance: memorize the flash, tap it all back

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  2-Echo: repeat the sequence in order

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  3-Pulse: clear each card before its ring ends

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  4-Three modes, 150 levels each

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  5-Endless: survive as long as you can

Inspiration

I wanted to make a memory game where the difficulty came from the rules, not from clutter. Most brain games pile on visual noise. I went the other way, a plain grid, two colors, and mechanics that get hard on their own terms.

What it does

Glimpse is a minimalist grid memory game with three modes, 150 levels each:

• Glance flashes a set of tiles, you tap them back.
• Echo shows a sequence one tile at a time, you repeat it in order.
• Pulse spawns cards with a number and a shrinking timer ring, you clear each before its ring runs out.

Every mode has an Endless variant that climbs to its hardest setting and holds there while your score decays each second you hesitate, with a Game Center leaderboard for each. Endless unlocks by clearing level 10 in its own mode, on progress alone.

There are no ads, ever. A cosmetic token economy unlocks color themes, earned by playing or bought with optional token packs. Nothing is locked behind money, and every mode is free.

How I built it

Built solo in SwiftUI, iOS 17+, using the @Observable model throughout. State lives in a single game view-model state machine per mode. Progress persists to UserDefaults mirrored to iCloud, so a player's levels and high scores follow them across devices with no account and no backend.

Purchases run through RevenueCat. Game Center handles the three Endless leaderboards. Every sound effect and the ambient background audio were synthesised from scratch in Python, no licensed audio anywhere. The interface uses only SF Symbols and basic shapes.

The app ships in 8 languages.

Challenges I ran into

Tuning 150 levels per mode by hand, as the person who already knows every level is the least reliable way to judge difficulty. The first version ran nine plain 3x3 levels before the grid ever changed, which was boring, so I rebuilt the whole structure: play order separated from difficulty order, so a player meets every grid size within their first four levels. Every value is written by hand rather than generated from a curve, so a single bad level can be fixed without re-deriving everything.

What I learned

Test the payment path on a real device, read the logs, and never trust a purchase that "looks" successful. And that shipping is its own skill, separate from building.

What's next

Dart, a fourth mode built around reaction rather than recall, is next. After that, more cosmetic types beyond themes, per-player difficulty tuning from real drop-off data, and Game Center achievements.

Built With

• game-center
• icloud
• ios
• python
• revenuecat
• storekit
• swift
• swiftui