Hi Product Hunt. I had never written a line of code when I started this, and I still can't. Poodle Panic was built in conversation with Claude over several weeks, mostly at night. I'd rather say that plainly than have somebody work it out. The game is about the thing my two toy poodles do at dusk for no reason either of them will explain. Paw parents call it the zoomies. Here it isn't a power-up that keeps you safe — it's a button that makes the dog faster and harder to control in exchange for a bigger multiplier, and then asks you when to stop. Bank it and it's yours. Crash and it never was. The two dogs aren't skins. Milky has 0.75 seconds of airtime and a gentle 3x/5x/8x ladder. Mongae has 0.51 and a brutal 2x/8x/20x. Hole widths are computed at spawn from whichever dog you picked, so choosing a character reshapes the geometry of the run rather than recolouring it. The part I'm proudest of is the least visible. Most games ship on the designer's instinct that a level is clearable. This one has a solver that takes every obstacle pattern, at every speed it can actually occur at, for both dogs, and searches every jump, hold and dive at 1/240 of a second. It found a pattern I had built on purpose and left a proud comment on, and proved it had a zero-millisecond window. I deleted it. Every pattern in the game now has a survivable line with at least 158 milliseconds of room. On the Shipaton run: Apple rejected it twice, both times because they couldn't find the in-app purchase. It turned out my own review notes had told the reviewer to look in the wrong place. That was a bad week and an entirely fair one. There are no ads, no timers, no energy, no lives and no continues. It asks for nothing — no account, no email, not one text field in the whole app — and it makes no network requests at all. Nothing is collected because nothing needs to be, and the simplest way not to mishandle data is not to have any. Happy to answer anything about how it was built. I'm especially curious whether the bank-or-hold decision lands for people who didn't design it.

Poodle Panic

Two poodles, one thumb, one decision you keep getting wrong

Two poodles, one thumb, one decision you keep getting wrong