This was the second game I started. At the time all three mini games were moving in parallel. I adjusted them as traffic and my own ideas shifted.
From the beginning I wanted a hyper-casual mix of collecting and memory flip — in the spirit of something like Yang Le Ge Yang, which had exploded a few years earlier. I did a little market check. Games like this were mostly past their moment. My thought was that a hit had been a hit for a reason, so maybe picking it up again still had a chance — and I wanted a small twist: memory flip.
The first version was a failure. I built one large board, showed every card, then flipped some back, and the player had to remember and clear three of a kind through a holding area. I auto-generated a hundred levels, difficulty climbing with card count, how many were face-down, the size of the holding area, and so on. To avoid a dull grid I made other shapes — hearts, circles. The positions were computed and placed in the scene. Tuning that took a lot of time.
I did not think v1 was fun. The scene and the look were weak. After it went live on WeChat with no traffic, I left it.
The rewrite came when I found Douyin’s information-feed play, and when the software copyrights for all three games came through. I had a shot at free traffic on Douyin, but v1 was not good enough.
The idea for the new version: keep the flip, add a collection, turn each slot into a stack, make rounds longer, and make finishing feel like something. Collection meant the faces could not be crude AI drawings, so I bought a pack of cute animal-sticker art on itch. I also added common, rare, and legendary cards. The items were more considered: some with a free try, then rewarded ads on later uses. Of my games, this one has the most layers of play.
I only wired the information feed on Douyin. The numbers were about the same as Arrow Snake, worse than Math Match. I did not keep developing it. iOS review had already hit a wall, so I did not update that build either.
Shipping this one basically made me lose hope in Douyin. From a making point of view, this was close to the best I could do. Traffic and money still did not follow. And with AI dropping the cost of making games so far, this kind of casual market has little room left for one person.
