THE TUESDAY NIGHT IT STARTED
Right, so here's how this whole thing started. Not in a boardroom. Not with a "market opportunity." On the couch, on a Tuesday night, trying to do a Sudoku before bed.
I open the app. Ad. Close the ad. The little X is the size of an atom, so I tap the ad instead and now I'm in the App Store looking at some game about merging cats. Back out. Finally see the puzzle. Tap a cell — pop, "WATCH AN AD FOR A HINT!" I didn't want a hint. I wanted to put a 4 in a box.
Then a wee timer. Then a "STREAK FROZEN — pay 200 coins." Coins I apparently earn by... watching more ads. I spent more time watching ads than solving anything. I think I did about three actual squares of Sudoku in fifteen minutes.
And I just sat there going: this is mad. This is genuinely mad. It's a number on a grid. That's it. That's the whole thing. Why does it need a casino bolted to the side of it?
FECK IT, I'LL BUILD MY OWN
So I did what any reasonable, slightly-too-stubborn person does. I said "feck it, I'll build my own."
Now — full disclosure — I'm not some fresh-faced startup with a pitch deck. I'm a developer from Northern Ireland and I've been at this the guts of twenty-odd years. Java, React, the lot — including a good long stretch of legacy systems and all the grim corporate plumbing nobody puts on a CV. I've shipped a lot of software I didn't love for a lot of reasons that weren't mine. So when I say a Sudoku app made me angry enough to build my own from scratch, on my own, in my spare time — believe me, I knew exactly how much rope I was handing myself. I did it anyway. I'm not a studio. I'm not a serious corporation. I'm one fed-up dev who got annoyed enough to do something about it.
THE WHOLE PITCH
But the idea was dead simple, and I think that's why I couldn't let it go:
- No words. Just numbers. Works in any language, no reading, no fluff.
- No ads mid-puzzle. Ever. You're solving — I'm not interrupting that. Full stop.
- One calm place for all the number puzzles I actually like, instead of eleven different ad-farms.
- And a wee ghost to keep you company, because why not. He grew on me.
That was the whole pitch. No spreadsheet. Just "make the thing I wish existed."
AND THEN ONE QUIET EVENING IT WORKS
I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into. The next few weeks nearly broke me — there's a puzzle generator in here that I'll rant about properly in the next post, because that one nearly finished me off and I have feelings. But you know the moment. Anyone who's built anything knows it. You bang your head off a wall for two weeks, and then one quiet evening it just... works. And it's the best feeling in the world.
That's GridJoy. That's the whole reason it exists. I just wanted to solve a puzzle in peace, couldn't find one that'd let me, and got stubborn about it.
Stick around — it gets messier (and funnier) from here. If you want to see how it turned out, today's Sudoku is right here — no ads, no coins, no cats to merge.
— the fed-up dev behind GridJoy 👻