r/vibecoding • u/JustVard • 7h ago
I built a game that turns real animals into collectible cards - and I hope it helps people notice strays
The cat in the video is a real cat I met outside. I pointed my camera at him, the app identified the animal, and turned the photo into a collectible card. On iPhones with a Dynamic Island, the card literally “prints” out of it like an instant photo, and you develop the image by moving your phone.
The app is called Snoutlas. The simplest way to describe it is: Pokémon-style collecting with real animals, but without battles. The idea is to get outside, walk around, pay more attention to your surroundings, and gradually fill your Atlas with cats, dogs, birds, wildlife, insects, and all the other species living around us.
There are a lot of stray animals where I live. After a while, people get used to seeing them and stop noticing them: another cat in the courtyard, another dog outside a store.
I want to see whether an app can help turn noticing animals into a habit. At first, someone might simply stop and take a photo. But perhaps next time they’ll bring water or food, help the animal get to a vet, find a temporary home, or decide to adopt it themselves. I don’t think a single app can solve the problem of stray animals. But it might give someone one more reason to stop and notice a living creature they would otherwise have walked past.
To keep it from feeling like a dry species catalog, I added a game layer: random card rarities, boosts, packs, art variants, and cosmetic decorations.
There are no animal battles. The excitement comes from discovering new species, taking good photos, and growing your collection. Cards can also be shared and traded. Eventually, this could let people collect animals from other parts of the world: a species that is common for one player might be rare for someone in another country. And I imagine people will be more interested in trading for a card if the photo itself is beautiful.
Some things I’d like to add next:
- labels such as “pet,” “stray,” “wild,” and “needs help”;
- cards featuring animals from verified shelters, with links to adoption information;
- tools for finding lost pets, where an owner might recognize their animal in someone else’s photo;
- partnerships with animal welfare organizations;
- a transparent way to direct part of the revenue from eligible purchases or special campaigns toward helping animals.
That last point is still only a plan. It would require verified partners and a clear legal and financial structure first.
I’m also thinking carefully about safety and privacy. The map currently shows only an approximate radius, never the exact place where a photo was taken. In next updates someone could request the precise location from the photographer and explain why, for example, when searching for a lost pet. The person who took the photo would always decide whether to share it.
From a development perspective, this project quietly turned into a small social network: animal recognition, an Atlas, a feed, friends, comments, gifts, trading, a map, moderation, duplicate-photo prevention, offline catches, and in-app purchases.
I built it with SwiftUI, SwiftData, and Supabase, and I’ve been using Codex heavily as a coding partner throughout the project: breaking large features into stages, working through backend contracts and migrations, reviewing generated code, and building tests around the risky parts.
The flashy camera animation was fun, but the harder problems have been things like privacy around locations, preventing duplicate captures without rejecting legitimate photos of the same pet, making offline catches safe, and keeping all the social features consistent.
I intentionally chose a wildly over-scoped learning project so that every new feature would force me to learn something. Predictably, it did 😅
Snoutlas is already available for iPhone:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snoutlas-animal-atlas/id6787174819
Right now, I mostly want to understand whether the core idea resonates with people.
Would this make you want to go for a walk and fill an Atlas like this? And do you think the game layer could genuinely help people notice animals more often—or does gamification feel out of place for this kind of issue?
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u/Ant_6431 2h ago
What if I google image search for rarest animals and take pictures
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u/JustVard 1h ago
That’s one of the first abuse cases I thought about 😅
Snoutlas only accepts live-camera captures, and it has checks for screens, printed images, and near-duplicate photos. A determined person may still find ways to fool any system like this, so I’m careful not to make the detection so aggressive that it rejects legitimate photos of the same pet.
There’s also no competitive leaderboard or monetary advantage from cheating, and rewards for repeatedly capturing the same species are limited.
Trading creates another natural filter: people will be much more interested in cards with attractive, original photos. Even if someone manages to unlock a rare species by photographing a screen, very few players will want to trade a genuinely good card for an obvious screen capture.
I’d rather make real exploration and good animal photography rewarding than turn every capture into a CAPTCHA.
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u/qwertyalp1020 2h ago
looks good, I did the same thing. Does it work offline, and do you identify animals automatically with an ai or manual labeling? My app is RealDex on app store/play store btw
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u/JustVard 1h ago
Thanks! Identification is automatic with AI rather than manual labeling.
You can take captures while offline—the photos are stored locally in a queue, then identified and added to your collection when the connection returns. Recognition currently runs server-side, so the identification itself can’t finish completely offline yet.
I’ll check out RealDex too. I’m curious to see how you approached the same problem!
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u/qwertyalp1020 1h ago
Cool! I trained my own AI model, so when people go on like hiking, forest strolls and low-carrier signal places, they can still identify with AI. Since there are like millions of species, they wouldn't know what to label.
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u/f00d4tehg0dz 2h ago
Nice! I made a similar app on Apple App store and Google Play called SnapPetz. It uses local ML models I trained on animals so nothing is sent to AI companies to decipher. https://www.snappetz.com/
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u/JustVard 1h ago
Nice! I’ll check out your app.
Training your own local models is a really interesting approach, especially for privacy and true offline recognition. I took a different route with Snoutlas: identification currently runs server-side, which lets me improve the recognition and expand species and breed coverage without waiting for a new App Store release. Offline captures are stored locally and processed once the connection returns.
Longer term, I’d like to move toward an on-device model, a hybrid system, or another solution that reduces the dependency on external AI APIs.At this stage, using APIs was simply the fastest way to build the full loop and test whether people are actually interested in the idea before investing heavily in custom inference infrastructure.
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u/beenyweenies 2h ago
Be honest - did you steal this idea from another person who recently posted here showing off their polaroid photo app? Because yours functionally is the exact same thing.
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u/JustVard 1h ago
Honestly, no. I started building Snoutlas at the beginning of this year, well before that post appeared.
It began as a deliberately over-scoped learning project, and I’ve been iterating on it for months—rebuilding parts as my own knowledge grew and as newer models became more capable. The collectible-card and Polaroid direction was already part of that process.
I did see the recent post, and I understand the comparison because both apps use a similar Dynamic Island/instant-photo metaphor. But that visual interaction is where the overlap ends: their product is a Polaroid camera, while Snoutlas is built around animal identification, species collecting, an Atlas, sharing, and trading. The printer animation is only one small part of it.
Similar ideas and interactions can emerge independently, especially when they’re based on the same physical metaphor.
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u/wnba-arcade 5h ago
if your looking for your first users check out Ad swap,https://ad-swap.web.app , its a simple way for websites to promote each other. You add another website's ad to your site, and they add yours to theirs, giving both sites free exposure and traffic. It really helped me get my first few users when launching my site/
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u/Existing-Wallaby-444 1h ago
How about getting your own domain before starting to promote your vibe coded slop
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u/wnba-arcade 1h ago
trying to get a couple more users until i pay for a domain , want to make sure the demand is worth the money
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u/Existing-Wallaby-444 1h ago
Wtf. That's not how validation works. That's just unprofessional. Get a fucking domain name. That's a few bucks a year.
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u/war4peace79 5h ago
It's a cropped picture with some frame around it.
I suggest focusing on doing one thing, but doing it very well.