How we built Color Blocks in four months

Color Blocks is the tenth game we have shipped and the first one we finished ahead of the date we set. Four months, two people, no outside help apart from a friend who tested it on an old Android phone. Here is roughly how the time went.

Month one: one rule

We started with a single constraint: the game had to be playable with one thumb while standing. That rule decided the board size, the tray position and, eventually, the whole art direction. Anything that needed a second hand or a precise tap got cut in the first three weeks, including a rotation gesture we were fond of.

The prototype was ugly and finished in nine days. We played it on the bus for two weeks before writing any real code.

Month two: the week we nearly restarted

Scoring was the hard part. Our first system rewarded clearing multiple lines at once, which sounds obvious and turned out to make the game tense in a way we did not want. Players stopped placing pieces and started hoarding them.

The scoring rewarded hoarding, so people hoarded. Changing the reward changed the game more than any art pass did.

The version we shipped rewards steady clearing with a small, visible multiplier that decays slowly. It reads as generous, which is the feeling we were after.

Month three: colour, sound, and old phones

The palette went through four passes. The last one was driven by a colour-blindness simulator: two of our block colours were nearly identical under deuteranopia, so every piece also got a distinct shape. Sound came late and quiet on purpose.

We bought two second-hand Android phones for testing, both four years old. They found more problems in a weekend than a month of editor testing did: dropped frames on the clear animation, a memory spike on the daily board, and a font that failed to render Turkish characters in one place.

Month four: shipping

The last month was store assets, ad placement and the leaderboard. Ads only appear between rounds, which cost us roughly a third of the revenue the network default placement would have produced. We decided that was the price of the game feeling calm.

Color Blocks went out on 14 March 2026 at 24 MB. If you want to see what four months of two people looks like, it is free on both stores.