Shadow Blocks v4.0.0 — From Idea to Google Play in One Year
After a year of nights, weekends, and an unhealthy amount of coffee — Shadow Blocks is LIVE on Google Play. This is the full story.
The Beginning
One year ago I had no idea how to ship a mobile game. I had a full-time job at Lidl, two boys to raise, and exactly zero published games. What I did have was a stubborn belief: if smaller studios can do it, so can one person with a laptop and good tools.
The plan was simple — build a Match-3 game, but make it look nothing like the standard Candy Crush clones flooding the Play Store. Dark fantasy. Atmospheric backgrounds. A wordless story of escape. Shadow Blocks was born.
The Stack
Solo indie dev means making smart choices. Here's what powered the build:
- GameMaker Studio 2 — pure GML, fast iteration, mobile-first
- Firebase Realtime DB — global leaderboard, free tier
- Google Veo — every animated background was AI-rendered
- Photopea — sprites, UI, marketing assets (free Photoshop alternative)
- Claude + Gemini + NotebookLM — AI-augmented development workflow
The AI workflow deserves its own post, but in short: Gemini handles daily GML coding, Claude reviews architecture and catches bugs, and NotebookLM stores all the project lore.
What's Inside
The final v4.0.0 package:
- 80 handcrafted levels across 8 atmospheric biomes
- 4K AI-rendered animated backgrounds — Prison, Dungeon, Grave, Torture Chamber, Corridor, Skeleton King, Bridge, Desert
- 6 languages — EN, PL, DE, ES, FR, PT
- Shadow Slash mini-game — skill-based with global TOP 100 leaderboard
- Free to play — with optional ads-removal IAP
What Almost Killed The Project
Three things almost shut this down:
1. Burnout
Six months in, I had nothing playable. Just systems, half-finished levels, broken physics. I considered quitting more than once. The fix: shipping vertical slice first — one polished biome, end-to-end. Once I could play it on my phone, motivation came back.
2. Performance on older devices
Animated 4K backgrounds looked stunning, but drained batteries. Phones got hot. Frame drops. The fix: aggressive optimization, but more importantly — a future Battery Saver Mode (now shipped in v4.1.0).
3. The Final Mile
The last 10% takes 90% of the time. Privacy policy. Store listings. Screenshots. Trailers. Translations. AdMob integration. Firebase rules. Each piece felt like its own mini-project. The fix: brutal scope cuts. v4.0.0 shipped without features I originally planned. They'll come in v4.x.
What I Learned
Shipping changes you. A few things I now believe more than I did a year ago:
- Done beats perfect. Players don't see what you cut. They see what's there.
- AI tools are leverage, not replacement. Claude and Gemini compress weeks into days, but you still need taste, vision, and discipline.
- Solo dev is a marathon, not a sprint. Family support matters more than any IDE or asset pack.
- Mobile-first is harder than it sounds. Touch controls, battery, OEM fragmentation — every decision multiplies.
What's Next
Shadow Blocks isn't done. Roadmap:
- Hotfixes & polish — based on player feedback (already shipped v4.0.1 and v4.1.0)
- Shadow Raid — top-down vertical shooter, in prototype phase
- Operation: Shadow — 2D action platformer (later this year)
And eventually — leaving Lidl behind. June 22nd, 2026 is the target date. Alastis Dev becomes my full-time studio. If you've played Shadow Blocks, you're already part of that story.