Animalis 🐾 https://xitter.cf/t.co/Ihph9SW1Hs Customer Finder 🔎 https://xitter.cf/t.co/AAL3JbGj0h Mechanical Engineer, Business Development, AI
Oxford, UK
Joined June 2011
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I've been working on a game, Animalis: Catch Real Animals, for the last 3 months. Now it has over 100 sales a month and people playing around the world.
The game is simple, you photo a real wild animal with your phone, then it appears as a character on your screen that you can battle and catch. Build up your team to compete with other players and fill out your encyclopaedia of animals worldwide.
Animalis is played in the real world, places of worship are in-game health centres, grocery stores are in-game shops and every public park contains a gym that you can battle to take over and hold off challengers. You can even set your real home as your in-game home for storing your animals. The further you go out into nature (away from urban areas), the high level the animals are, so stronger, but harder to catch!
You can level up your animals, learn new moves, and grow them through their natural growth stages, e.g. caterpillar > chrysalis > butterfly . Every animal species in the world is catchable in the game, players are playing from Singapore to Seattle, catching every animal from beetles to birds to bears.
So far, around 1,000 unique animal species have been captured in the game, thousands of animals have been caught & battled and tens of gyms have been taken over worldwide (there's a gym in your local park)!
It's available on iOS & Android. Here is the link to the landing page, which redirects to the app stores if you're on mobile: playanimalis.com/
P.S. you can see a live map of all animals caught in the game to date on the landing page (view on desktop). Let me know if you check it out :)
I made this app which is nowhere near as popular as my other app, but I use it and it works for me for finding customers: customer-finder.com
Anyone want to try it and tell me if it doesn't work for them? You get free usage, no-one has paid yet.
Posted my app on Reddit which uses gen AI.
Usual comments from some people saying AI is destroying the environment. I literally showed them the calculation of how browsing reddit actually uses more energy than playing a mobile game outside.
Not interested, lmao.
@buffer I know I'm using your app for free, but it is super unreliable.
Maybe like 20% of my posts fail to send. I do a screen recording in the same way on my phone every time and compress the video in the same way.
Issues:
- the app should automatically use your previous settings. I have to manually set the sending to All Channels every time and the post type, it should just remember that.
- I have to type the video name twice, the second time is as description for YouTube shorts or something, it should at least auto populate that as a suggestion.
- I don't find out that a video type is incompatible until I press Next, it should show a warning on the page instead of waiting until you click the button.
- whenever something fails to post, your app basically never explains why. I don't think I've ever seen it have any useful info as to why a post failed. I'm sure you're getting a text error response back from the social media platform APIs.
You should add some compression and aspect ratio scaling etc to your app. Right now, I have to use another app to do this, FFShare, it would be way better if your app just does it all for me.
I'm considering just vibe coding an app that does everything I want, but I'm sure these features would be useful to all users.
Take a photo of your components, pass it to AI, ask it to create you a design based on the components that you have available.
i'm obsessed with this idea of "vibe coding physical devices" right now
even hardware noobs (like me!) can now finally turn our weird little ideas into gadgets that actually work
you just describe the gadget you want, then schematik (basically cursor for hardware) picks the correct parts, writes the code to run them and walks you through building it.
for example, here are 10 templates you can start with and make your own:
1. a plant that throws a disco
a soil sensor warns you when it’s thirsty. water it and the LED ring celebrates with rainbow lights and a victory tune lol
2. a morning receipt printer
turn it on and it prints today’s forecast onto a little paper briefing, with optional calendar events and blank lines for handwritten to-dos.
3. a digital hair clip
a tiny wearable screen that displays your own messages. press a button to cycle through them.
4. a weather display that tells you what to wear
checks the weather over wi-fi, then tells you whether to grab a jacket, umbrella, sunglasses, shorts or scarf. updates every 10 minutes.
5. a tiny desk companion
tap its face to change expressions, tilt it to move its eyes, and swipe through the clock, weather and stock price.
6. a lamp you control with your hand
swipe sideways to change color, up or down to change brightness. it saves your settings for the next time you power it on.
7. a pet treat dispenser
press a button and it weighs the bowl before opening the gate. it blocks another serving if the bowl’s already full or the cooldown hasn’t finished.
8. a live flight radar
a tiny round display that plots nearby aircraft and their callsigns, using live flight data fetched over wi-fi every 5 seconds.
9. a dedicated touchscreen chess game
tap pieces to move and play against a small chess engine running on the device. the screen and processor are already on one board.
10. an air monitor for your room
measures CO₂, temperature and humidity, then tells you when rising CO₂ means it’s time to air out the room.
I post a lot on LinkedIn about AI and apps I'm building. Now people message me to ask for advice, I also give sales advice as I worked in business development previously.
This takes like an hour of my time and maybe 2-4 hours of mental load. Having to say no to some people or just tell them to message me anything specific they want to ask about.
Thinking to just start charging now, maybe £200 for a call or something. Although I don't even want to do that, I would rather just not have the call.
Catching a Cormorant in Rome. You can catch any animal in the world in Animalis: Catch Real Animals, battle it, add it to your team and train it up.
Then compete with other players in your local gym (based in your local park) or worldwide in The Lek battle league.
Download link: playanimalis.com/
How viable is it to make a full game in the browsers, like what are the limitations?
I assume it can't use all of your computer's hardware.
Nice, I had one of those things that you see on Twitter where AI deletes your whole codebase.
It's now restored, I guess from the local copies.
My friend said I should share my coding setup. There is nothing for you to download, just tell your AI to copy any these aspects.
I have been improving my coding setup through use for 6-12 months. I now just dump any number of tasks into parallel sessions, as many as I can personally keep track of, which is about 5-6 at a time.
I use Claude Code in the command line. It then spawns sub-agents using cheaper models to save cost. The sub-agents no longer run on my computer as I was maxing out the CPU, they now run on Claude (Anthropic's) servers, which they let you do for free for some reason.
On Anthropic's $200 / month plan, I can run like 5 parallel sessions, 5 days a week, and not run out of usage.
I can now run many coding sessions in parallel and run a game on my laptop with no affect on performance. Code tests that used to run on my laptop now run on a server that I already pay $70 / month for for hosting part of my app.
I use Render for hosting, which waits for the new deploy to be live before turning off the old server. However, if you deploy too quickly in succession then your app will go down for a few minutes. For me, the safe time is 12 minutes, so this is setup in my Claude deploy process, it waits 12 minutes between deploys.
I realised that this 12 minute wait was stacking up, so I thought why don't deploys in the queue combine instead? This is probably normal software development, but I had to work it out myself.
In parallel with the deploy to production, the full test suite, probably 2,000+ tests, runs on my self-hosted server and flags any issues back to Claude, which fixes them and re-deploys automatically. It also automatically checks Sentry after a deploy and fixes any alerts that have been caused.
I believe traditional software development uses testing & staging, I don't do any of that, I just push straight to production and fix any changes quickly. Sounds unprofessional, but it is worth the trade-off of having to run testing environments, which aren't even accurate representations of the real production environment anyway. Different data, different server specs etc.
Now that my app is getting fairly popular, Animalis: Catch Real Animals, for any new major features I push them to production, but only my account has access to it. When it's running ok, I then remove the access limitations and it goes live to all users.
For any UI (user interface) changes, I have Claude setup to automatically create me a local website to review them before approving, even with basic functionality if I need to test a feature like an action clicking a button.
Also, I can do all this from my phone, see video below.
My friend said I should share my coding setup. There is nothing for you to download, just tell your AI to copy any these aspects.
I have been improving my coding setup through use for 6-12 months. I now just dump any number of tasks into parallel sessions, as many as I can personally keep track of, which is about 5-6 at a time.
I use Claude Code in the command line. It then spawns sub-agents using cheaper models to save cost. The sub-agents no longer run on my computer as I was maxing out the CPU, they now run on Claude (Anthropic's) servers, which they let you do for free for some reason.
On Anthropic's $200 / month plan, I can run like 5 parallel sessions, 5 days a week, and not run out of usage.
I can now run many coding sessions in parallel and run a game on my laptop with no affect on performance. Code tests that used to run on my laptop now run on a server that I already pay $70 / month for for hosting part of my app.
I use Render for hosting, which waits for the new deploy to be live before turning off the old server. However, if you deploy too quickly in succession then your app will go down for a few minutes. For me, the safe time is 12 minutes, so this is setup in my Claude deploy process, it waits 12 minutes between deploys.
I realised that this 12 minute wait was stacking up, so I thought why don't deploys in the queue combine instead? This is probably normal software development, but I had to work it out myself.
In parallel with the deploy to production, the full test suite, probably 2,000+ tests, runs on my self-hosted server and flags any issues back to Claude, which fixes them and re-deploys automatically. It also automatically checks Sentry after a deploy and fixes any alerts that have been caused.
I believe traditional software development uses testing & staging, I don't do any of that, I just push straight to production and fix any changes quickly. Sounds unprofessional, but it is worth the trade-off of having to run testing environments, which aren't even accurate representations of the real production environment anyway. Different data, different server specs etc.
Now that my app is getting fairly popular, Animalis: Catch Real Animals, for any new major features I push them to production, but only my account has access to it. When it's running ok, I then remove the access limitations and it goes live to all users.
For any UI (user interface) changes, I have Claude setup to automatically create me a local website to review them before approving, even with basic functionality if I need to test a feature like an action clicking a button.
Also, I can do all this from my phone, see video below.
Remember when 6 months ago people said the differentiating factor with humans using AI is taste.
Where are all those people now?
