The group chat 📱

I have a group chat with former work colleagues. All from a mobile background, all excited about AI, all building their own products and apps on the side. Some being very successful with it, others not as much (enters me 😅). Every time we spend some time in there talking about our personal projects, I come out wanting to build something new and get some of that success.

I promise I’m more proud of you than envy Tomas 😅 and thanks for all the hints and tips and sharing your journey with us all the time. It’s awesome to see and inspiring.

That chat is where the motivation for my Water Reminder app came from. And while the idea for this new project goes back a long way, it was yet another conversation there that gave me the final push to go for it now. Thanks folks 🤝

A game I’ve loved since I was a kid 📖

Growing up in Portugal, there were always Cruzadex magazines around. I spent loads of time playing those word games, Cruzadex itself was my favourite.

If you’ve never seen one, it’s a fill-in crossword: no clues, just a grid and a list of words, and your job is to work out where every word goes, scratching them off the list one by one. There’s something really satisfying about that moment when a single letter unlocks the whole grid.

Fast forward to 2012. A few other colleagues at the time and I decided we were going to start a company to build mobile games (little did I know that two years later I’d land an Android engineer job in another country, the start of the career that got me where I am today 😌).

We even had a name and a logo (remember I’m not a designer and wasn’t one back in 2012 😅), because like every good entrepreneur, we started with the most important things, right? Our company was going to be called Ludo Logic Labs (I still love the name today), and you guessed it, our first game was going to be, of course, a Cruzadex puzzle game.

We created the Android project, played with it a bit, and that’s about as far as it got. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this. I remembered this idea many times over the years, sometimes explored it a little, but it always ended up not becoming a real thing.

And here’s a fun twist I only found out now. Cruzadex is actually a registered trademark, owned by the company that publishes the magazines in Portugal (yes, they still exist). I was obviously going to go for that name for my app but I can’t 😥. So for the rest of the world, it’s going to be Fill-In Crosswords. For me and probably most Portuguese folks, it’ll always be Cruzadex.

Why now? ⏳

So what’s different this time? AI. Simple as that. For years, the problem was never the idea. It was time to do anything meaningful enough. A full-time job, a family now with two kids, a dog, the time I need to save for exercise (otherwise my body ages faster than the number on my ID card 👴), and everything else. There was just no way to squeeze in the countless evenings and weekends a game like this needs if you’re doing it by yourself.

With the AI tools we have today, the heavy lifting gets done in seconds or minutes. What could take multiple evenings now can be done by these tools in minutes. My time goes into planning what to build, and reviewing what comes out.

That’s a trade I can fit into my life. Before AI, I couldn’t.

Same recipe, new product 🛠️

And this time, I already know how I’m going to do it. The Prompt-Driven Product series had its challenges, and I wrote about all of them. But when it comes to actually building the product, the model worked. I was able to build my Water Reminder app for both Android and iOS, and my wife built her Something Good and Something Funny apps for both platforms as well with the same approach.

So I’m doing the same thing again: AI does the building, I own the product.

The first puzzle 🧩

Fourteen years after Ludo Logic Labs, I’m finally building our first game. It’s early days. I literally started planning this with Claude last night, and today I’m writing this and starting to build it. There’s already something to show though. With AI, it’s that fast.

My only design brief to Claude was to make it colourful and fun. Check out a couple of screenshots of what it built to start with. Definitely some work still required but really loving how it’s coming out so far. 😍

Also, it feels really nice to see a Cruzadex puzzle on a phone screen, especially built by myself (and my trusted engineer Claude). I think the 2012 Ludo Logic Labs team would be proud, and excited about what’s to come.

There’s still a long way to go before this is a real game though. I’ll keep sharing the journey here as it takes shape, and of course I’ll let you know when it’s out on Android and iOS so you can give it a try. Stay tuned for that 🙂