A pretend-play game app for kids

A pocket playroom for young children. A child picks one of six games and plays at her own pace: nothing to read, nothing to lose, and no clock running. Every game ends in something she made, and one tap on the heart saves it to a gallery she can come back to.

The look borrows from early-2000s kids' websites: glossy candy-colored buttons, sparkles that trail the finger, chunky rounded lettering, and bright little music loops. Nostalgic for the parent, simply fun for the child.

• Puppy Pal. The puppy always wants something: food, water, the ball, a cuddle, or a bath. It acts out the need until the child answers, and sometimes runs off and comes back muddy.
• Cake Bake. Tap ingredients into the bowl, whisk by rubbing in circles, bake, then frost and decorate.
• Nail Salon. Ten nails, fourteen polishes, stickers, gems, rings, glitter, and a top coat, with six skin tones.
• Dress-Up. A paper doll with a full wardrobe, six skin tones, six eye colors, and a twirl button.
• Makeup Studio. Lipstick, eyeshadow, and blush that stay inside the lines, at a Hollywood vanity.
• Potions. Charms fly into a bubbling cauldron, each with its own effect, and the finished potion gets a name based on what went in.

A preschooler can't read, taps imprecisely, and gives up the moment something doesn't respond. Every decision came back to those three facts.

• No reading required. Every control is a picture; the only text is in the parent settings.
• Big targets everywhere: at least 88 points on iPad and 64 on iPhone, well above Apple's guideline for adults.
• No sideways scrolling. Small children rarely discover that a row continues off screen, so every choice is visible at once.
• No fail states and no timers. Nothing can be done wrong, and nothing is ever taken away.
• Gentle guidance: a bouncing pointer shows the next step, and the puppy acts out what it needs.
• A grown-up gate: parent settings open only after a three-second press on the logo.

No ads, no in-app purchases, no accounts, and no network access at all. No analytics or third-party code. Saved creations stay on the device, and the App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected, backed by the privacy manifest Apple requires.

Pippa Games was built in milestones, each one playable before the next began: the app shell and visual system, then saving and the gallery, then one game at a time, then audio, then App Store preparation. I directed the product and design and playtested every build on iPhone and iPad, while Claude Code wrote the code and checked its own work in the simulators.

• Every illustration is drawn in code. The puppy, the doll and her wardrobe, the makeup face, the cauldron, and the cake are vector drawings built in Swift. Each garment is cut from the doll's own body outline, so changing her proportions refits every piece of clothing automatically.
• One app, four layouts. iPhone and iPad, upright and sideways, each get their own arrangement.
• Shipping. The App Store listing, screenshots for both devices, the privacy manifest, and a marketing site at pippagames.com.

• The flickering doll. The doll's skin flashed every time she changed clothes. The app cached her body and face by skin tone but read the tone from the wrong part of the cache key, so the two kept evicting each other. Reading the right part fixed it.
• A puppy that asks for help. The first game was a nacho maker with a fixed ending. I replaced it with Puppy Pal, an open-ended loop of needs and answers, so there's always something new to do and no way to fail.
• A playroom on a sideways phone. Turned sideways, an iPhone leaves about 400 points of height. Each game needed its own sideways layout, refined over several rounds of playtest notes.