I build apps for other people. Hueventure is the first one I built for myself.

Ask a developer who does client work what their own app is called. Then watch the pause.

I had that pause for years. Not because I ran out of ideas. My notes file is full of them, and most of them are still sitting right there, untouched, some of them older than the phone I am typing this on.

The reason was never mystery. It was math. Building a game is not the same as writing a game. The code is maybe a third of it. The rest is art, sound, tuning, a hundred small interface decisions, store screenshots, an icon you redo six times. When you bill your hours to somebody else, every hour you spend on your own thing is an hour nobody pays you for. So the client work gets finished, because it has a deadline and an invoice attached, and your own thing stays a folder. Year after year, it stays a folder.

Then the cost of that folder changed.

I want to be careful here, because this is the part where most people start shouting. AI did not make me a better game designer. It has no taste. It does not know when a level is boring, and it will happily build you something technically correct and completely dead. What it did was collapse the cost of all the parts I was never going to finish alone. The scaffolding, the repetitive systems, the first version of things I would have abandoned at 40 percent. I still decide what the game is. I just no longer have to pay for every experiment with a weekend I do not have.

That is a big change, and I am going to call it big, because writing carefully about something that actually is large is its own kind of dishonesty.

Two things I keep coming back to. Traveling, and puzzles.

Puzzles are obvious enough. Traveling is the one that gave me the idea. When you visit a place, the color hits you before anything else does. The blue of Chefchaouen. The pink of Jaipur. The particular orange of a bridge in fog. And the thing almost nobody tells you is that those colors are not decoration. They are records. Somebody made a decision, usually for a reason that had nothing to do with beauty, and the world has been looking at that decision ever since.

The Golden Gate Bridge is the clearest case. That famous orange was never supposed to be the final color. It was the primer coating protecting the steel, and the consulting architect argued to keep it because it held up against the fog and the hills, over a Navy proposal for black and yellow stripes (NPR). A shortcut became a landmark.

Or purple. Tyrian purple was extracted from sea snails, and it took roughly ten thousand of them to produce a single gram of dye (Penn State). That is the entire reason purple means royalty. Not symbolism, not poetry. Supply. Emperors claimed the color because almost nobody else could afford to wear it.

Jaipur is pink because a Maharaja had the city painted for a visiting prince in 1876, and a law passed the following year still keeps the old city that color today (Mental Floss).

I find that genuinely fun. A color is a fact about the world with a story folded inside it, and once you know a few of them you cannot walk through a city the same way again.

It is a color mixing puzzle, and I want to describe it plainly rather than sell it.

You get a board of colored blocks and a set of doors. Each door wants a specific color. You slide blocks together to mix what you need, red and blue into purple, and then slide each block to the door that matches. Dozens of boards across chapters, each one a small world. There is a daily challenge with a streak. There is a hint, a rewind, a bomb, for when you paint yourself into a corner.

That is the whole loop. It is simple on purpose. A puzzle either feels good in your hands in the first thirty seconds or it does not, and no amount of extra features rescues one that does not.

Now the honest part. The version on the App Store today is the puzzle. The color knowledge, the actual stories behind the colors, is the thing I am building next, not something already in your hands. I am designing it as a set of collectible cards you earn just by playing, each one a real color fact with a real source, biased toward the colors you actually mixed on that board. Make purple, learn what purple used to cost.

I could have waited and launched all of it at once. I chose not to, for one reason. If the puzzle is not fun on its own, facts will not save it. Nobody has ever kept playing a mediocre game because it was educational. So the loop ships first, and it earns the right to carry the rest.

Hueventure is on iOS only. That is not a strategy, it is honesty about capacity. If people actually play it, if there is real evidence it is worth the time, I will build the Android version. If they do not, I would rather know that early and put the hours somewhere better.

You can try it here. Hueventure on the App Store

I am going to keep writing here as I go, including the parts that do not work. This site is the log.

The folder of ideas I mentioned at the start is still open. What I did not expect was how much of it was never really an ability problem. It was a cost problem the whole time, and the cost moved.

So what is in your folder?