Save Slot

A gaming bucket list that captures games the moment you discover them, tells you what to play tonight and turns your backlog into something you share with friends

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Inspiration

Every gamer has had this conversation with themselves. You're scrolling TikTok or YouTube and a clip stops you: a boss fight, a trailer, someone raving about a game you've never heard of. I should play that. Then you keep scrolling, and it's gone. The games we want to play live in screenshots, notes apps and half-remembered recommendations, and the moment that convinced us evaporates.

Save Slot started from one question: what if saving a game was as fast as the urge itself?

What it does

Save Slot is a bucket list for games. Share a clip or a post, and the game is saved in seconds.

  • Share to save. From TikTok, YouTube or a browser, share to Save Slot and the game is identified and added to your pile. No account, ever. Measured at under 4 seconds from share sheet to slotted, on a seven-year-old phone.
  • Works with no signal. Your pile lives on your device and is the source of truth. Share a game in a tunnel and it saves immediately; identification catches up when you surface.
  • Tonight's Pick (premium). Can't decide? Save Slot deals one card at a time from your own pile, not an algorithm's. Play it, not tonight, or skip.
  • Release day. Upcoming games count down on their cover, and release day gets its own ceremony.
  • A reason to come back, never a guilt trip. A Saturday-morning digest of your pile, and one gentle nudge after two quiet weeks, at most once a month. Notification permission is asked after your first save of an upcoming game, never at launch.
  • Founder's Cartridges. Premium comes monthly, yearly, or as one of four one-time cartridges: Loose, CIB, Sealed and Graded. Every cartridge unlocks all of premium forever; the tier you choose is the collectible.

What it deliberately doesn't do: no accounts, no login wall, no streaks, no overdue counts, no shame statistics, and no red in normal UI. Shelving a game is a decision, not a lapse.

How we built it

A Laravel API and an Expo / React Native app for Android and iOS, with IGDB behind game identification. RevenueCat runs entitlements, the paywall and server-side webhooks, and every webhook is signature-verified and idempotent: a forged signature gets a 401, a valid event a 202, and the same event delivered twice leaves exactly one database row. OneSignal runs three Journeys (Saturday digest, release day, two-week win-back) from tags the app sets on device. Sentry watches crash health.

The build ran on a rule we made public on day one: fixed checkpoints with real consequences. Miss one and the next feature on the cut list goes. It

The build ran on a rule we made public on day one: fixed checkpoints with real consequences. Miss one and the next feature on the cut list goes. It fired twice: compare links were cut on Aug 16 and the starter flow on Aug 27. Everything that survived had to prove itself. Checkpoint 1 meant 58 tests and 127 assertions green, share-to-save verified on physical hardware, and a 1,000-entry performance run.

Challenges we ran into

The share sheet is the whole product. Save Slot lives or dies on the share flow. Getting it fast and reliable meant dev builds instead of Expo Go, testing on a real phone from day one, and careful offline handling: a capture made in airplane mode has to queue and drain cleanly on reconnect, and sharing the same game from two different posts must leave exactly one entry.

A test phone too old for its own app. Our entire test lab is one Galaxy S10 capped at Android 12, and the notification permission prompt only exists on Android 13+. Every capture flow is verified on real hardware; that one prompt is documented as the flow we couldn't run ourselves.

Saying no on a deadline. The hardest challenge wasn't technical. The checkpoint rule forced real tradeoffs, and cutting features we'd already designed hurt. It also kept the scope honest and the app shippable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Clip to saved game in under 4 seconds with no account, and it still saves with no signal.
  • Live on Google Play and the App Store since Sep 18, with 72 new installs in the first 12 days.
  • A RevenueCat integration that goes past the paywall screen: four collectible tiers that each unlock premium, and a webhook ledger that can't record the same purchase twice.
  • Built in public: a TikTok devlog where features lived and died by the checkpoint rule, and a waitlist at saveslot.co before launch.

What we learned

Constraints ship products. The checkpoint system felt theatrical at first, but putting a public guillotine over the feature list is the single biggest reason Save Slot exists as a finished app instead of an abandoned prototype. We also learned that "done" and "proven" are different states, and that mobile share flows are where good intentions go to die unless you test them on real hardware from day one.

What's next for Save Slot

First update: updating a game from your pile, and a share-card layout fix.

v1.1 brings accounts, the first identity ask, triggered only by friend features, with silent migration of an existing local pile so nothing is lost. Then Squad, a shared plan where one payer covers up to four friends, with entitlement-only sharing and no visibility into anyone else's pile.

v1.2 adds screenshots. They need on-device text recognition, so for now a screenshot fails gracefully rather than being promised.

Post-v1: compare links (cut from v1 by the checkpoint rule, design retained), a real mood filter once there's genuine signal behind it, and the LLM identification path revisited when the capture dataset can size the failures it would actually fix.

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