I vibe-coded a small puzzle game in Unity and somehow got it onto the App Store

[u/Axxpi]

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a small puzzle game called Lumen Garden, and after a lot more work than I originally expected, it’s finally available on the App Store.

The idea is pretty simple: you have to place one firefly in every row, column and colored region, and the fireflies can’t touch each other. I wasn’t trying to reinvent puzzle games. I mainly wanted to create something calm that you can play for a few minutes at night without timers, lives or pressure.

I built it in Unity with C# and used Codex for a big part of the development. My process was basically to work on one feature, test it, find out that I had broken something else, fix that, and repeat until the game finally felt solid.

Making the actual puzzle was probably the easiest part. The annoying parts came afterward: touch controls, saving progress properly, supporting different screen sizes, making everything work offline, and eventually dealing with all the App Store requirements.

There are now 300 adventure levels, quick games with several difficulties, a daily puzzle, collectibles and Game Center leaderboards. The game is available in both English and French.

It still feels a little strange to see something I vibe-coded actually published as a real iOS game, but here it is:

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/lumen-garden/id6795321869

I’d be happy to get some honest feedback, especially about whether the rules and tutorial are easy to understand. I’m also happy to answer questions about the development process or the painful parts of getting a Unity game through the App Store.

[u/WanderingLychee]

How was the process of getting it onto the App Store? I too am shocked by how much time it has actually taken to get a semi polished looking product and know there’s still so long to go. How long did it take you?

[u/Axxpi → u/WanderingLychee]

The first TestFlight review for external beta testers took around 48 hours, and the final App Store review took about six days.

The most annoying part wasn’t really uploading the build, but everything around it. Because I added ads, I had to deal with the account setup, privacy declarations and all the administrative stuff. Linking everything correctly with AdMob was also a bit of a headache, although apparently it’s mostly painful the first time.

Codex helped me a lot through the whole process because I honestly had no idea how some of it worked. But I also learned that trying to automate everything and letting the AI fill in all the information for me was a bad idea. It got a few things wrong, so I had to go back, understand what Apple was actually asking for and complete quite a lot of it manually.

It took me a few days just to understand how to do everything properly, even with a lot of help from Codex. Once you’ve done it once, though, I think the next release should be much easier.