Plonkie

Catch, collect and mutate hand-drawn creatures in a gentle multiplayer world, free on iPhone, iPad and the browser.

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Inspiration

Growing up, I loved games like Pokémon, Harvest Moon, and anything that let me collect creatures and evolve them. I loved the idea of a protagonist exploring a small town and venturing into a greater world, discovering things as they go. Creating Plonkie has honestly been a little surreal for me. These are creatures that I got to draw, give personalities, and then actually set free inside a world that I created. I also loved the idea of multiplayer creature-collecting games, so I had to make that for my game. I was also largely inspired by the game mechanics of Roblox games, especially Fisch. Plonkie is my attempt to recreate some of that childhood excitement while making a world and a bunch of characters that are completely my own.

What it does

Plonkie is a free creature-collecting game for iPhone, iPad and the browser. It is not about fighting and trading; it is about collecting, discovery, rarity, and mutation.

  • Catch wild plonkies with a hold-and-release bar. Different zones, day and night, and live weather change what shows up.
  • Collect them on your shelves. Every catch rolls its own colours, so no two are alike.
  • Mutate two plonkies in the lab to make a new species, or hatch an egg. The rarest plonkies only come out of the lab. More than 140 species so far.
  • Read the story in letters from the Doctor, with side letters from the other researchers.
  • Share one world at the campfire: chat, mail a plonkie to a friend as a gift, watch catches roll in, climb the rankings.

Everything can be earned for free. The optional purchases are Luck Shards (a shard raises everyone's catch luck at the campfire for fifteen minutes) and the Founder Light, a one-time supporter pack. On iOS they run through RevenueCat.

How we built it

I drew the Plonkies one by one and integrated them in a now defunct site called vie.dev. One of the biggest goals was making everything feel connected rather than building a collection of separate features. The creatures, laboratory, environments, interface, progression, and story all needed to feel like they belonged on the same strange little planet.

For the technical side, I used React and TypeScript, packaged for iOS with Capacitor. Supabase handles the database, auth and realtime. The server owns anything that matters: catch prices, timing floors, streaks, purchases. The client is only ever allowed to ask. RevenueCat handles the store on iOS; its webhook calls an idempotent grant function, so a replayed receipt cannot mint anything twice. The web version and the landing page are on Cloudflare Pages.

It has gone through a lot of iterations. I ran an open web beta from early August and shipped the App Store version inside the Shipaton window: 1.0 on the web on Sep 13, submitted to App Review on Sep 14, approved and released on Sep 23. Many parts of the UI, gameplay, progression, and even the way players interact with Plonkies changed as I actually played the game and watched other people experience it.

Challenges we ran into

  • App Review rejected the first build under Guideline 4.0. After Sign in with Apple, the intro asked for a username, and it read like a request for a real name. I prefilled the handle from the provider name, added a caption saying it is a nickname, resubmitted the same day with an expedite, and it passed.
  • Launch night outage. A duplicate database function overload broke every cast for 47 minutes right after 1.0 went live. Fixed by dropping the extra overload, and the migration generator now refuses to leave two behind.
  • Bots. Someone wrote an auto-fisher against the web beta. Rarity is now hidden until the catch resolves.
  • The first Ethereal ever caught was eaten by my own anti-bot timer, which never accounted for the player's luck buff. The floor is now rarity-aware and the catch was restored.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The thing I'm most proud of is simply that Plonkie became real. I can open the game and walk into a world containing creatures that I created from nothing. I was elated when my friends logged into Plonkie every night and ground their own leaderboard! That is still a pretty surreal feeling. I'm also proud that Plonkie has developed its own identity. It is inspired by the games I grew up loving, but the creatures, world, humor, laboratory, art direction, and systems have gradually become something that feels distinctly like Plonkie.

For the app itself, I am very happy with the numbers and the beta testers. 178 accounts, 17,493 wild catches, 7,122 mutations, 155 species discovered by players, 22,959 messages at the campfire and 418 plonkies mailed as gifts, all by word of mouth. A tester's "the colours have gone dull" turned into a five-cause audit and a full colour pass. Another tester's "there is no ENTER button" got fixed three different ways in one night.

What we learned

Building Plonkie taught me that making a game is as much about removing and refining ideas as it is about adding them.

A feature can sound great on paper but feel completely different once someone actually plays it. Small details in onboarding, pacing, interface design, and feedback can matter just as much as a major gameplay system.

What's next for Plonkie

More species, more letters, seasonal events, and an iPad-first pass on the shelf! The web version stays free and shares the same world as the app.

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