Drinking games app

1 year ago

In the second year of my applied sciences bachelor I had a Unity course in the third period. Right after it, I used my fresh Unity skills to build a simple app with all the drinking games my friends and I played back then, and there were a lot of them. I only ever exported it as an APK, so it was Android only, and the UX was not exactly great. Still, it worked, we had a lot of fun with it over the years, and I kept adding more games. At some point I just left it as it was, and that was good enough.

After a two and a half month trip through Thailand last year, in 2025, I came back with new inspiration. I decided to rebuild the whole thing properly this time, and to actually publish it in the Play Store and App Store. In the same week I got home, in March, I rebuilt the app from scratch in Expo and added a lot of new features and even more games. New additions included drinking challenges, digital games, and support for multiple themes and languages.

Then came the process of actually getting an app into the Play Store, and well, I really underestimated how much effort that would take. You need ten testers who test your app every single day for fourteen consecutive days, which turned out to be surprisingly hard to arrange. I ended up finding people on Reddit who were in the exact same boat, and we all tested each other's apps every day and gave feedback. It cost me a good chunk of time every day and it was hard to keep it up, but eventually I pulled it off and got the app into the Play Store.

After that I added subscriptions and purchases, so users can either pay once for the premium features or take a subscription of one euro per month. This was a genuinely challenging part of the project, since I had never worked with subscriptions or published an app in a store before.

From there I kept adding more drinking games and challenges and improving the code. The one thing I did not really do was market the app. So after sitting still for about half a year, I started promoting it by building a marketing tool that generates AI videos about the drinking games in the app and explains them. It let me pump out videos really fast, so I could post one to TikTok and Instagram every day.

I also started preparing the app for the App Store, which, unfortunately, I am still trying to get into. One of the first hurdles was that I had to deliver app mockups for a lot of different screen sizes, which was really hard to make, and every online tool for it cost money. So naturally I built my own mockup screenshot generator to create all the mockups and banners for the store page. The main reason Apple did not want to accept the app, though, was that they said there were already enough apps in the same category. I did not really agree, but after going back and forth with them a LOT of times and changing the app more than once, I could not find a way in without drastically changing the concept. So for now it is on hold, but I will get an app into the App Store one day. Stupid iOS, I really am not a fan, haha.

The app is live on the Google Play Store.