Stack And Bomb Saved

Stack and Bomb was conceived in November of 2025 and first launched on Amazon’s App Store, Google Play and Apple’s App Store in September of 2018.The game was a passion project that I used to learn how to program a video game in Unity. The coding started in UnityScript, but all of the code had to be migrated to C# before the launch.

I was proud of the accomplishment. Stack And Bomb is an original arcade concept that I find fun to play. Each stage had a unique and engaging song thanks to Terry Cobb. The graphics and user interface were remedial, but I was aiming for a simple game with a retro feel. I priced the app 99 cents.

The launch landed with a thud. I experimented with running sales, but the only price point below 99 cents was 0. When the app went on sale for free, people downloaded and played. I only sold one copy to someone in Germany via Apple’s app store.

I grew frustrated maintaining the app to see thousands of people download it but earn nothing. Sometime near the beginning of the Covid Pandemic I updated the Unity version one more time. I decided that if I can’t make money off the game, at least it could bring happiness to those suffering isolation around the world. I set the price to free permanently, and I pretty much walked away.

If you don’t update your app…

Turns out the 2020 version of Unity I had deployed contained a security violation. After several years of warnings, in 2023 Apple removed the app from App Store. Honestly, I thought Google Play had also removed the game, but they had not. In February 2026 I decided to use Claude Code to update my app to an compliant Unity version and get the app back on the stores. I found out that I had about 68 days until Stack And Bomb was going to be removed from Google Play.

That became the challenge. Update 4 versions of Unity in 68 days in order to save Stack And Bomb. I had no intention of changing the game, only updating Unity versions. Upgrading Unity versions previously had been a huge pain in my ass, so I was only hoping to take 30ish days plus the hassle of fixing all the store agreements, warnings and release pipelines.

It took about 3 hours to upgrade Unity versions to a version that would be accepted on the stores. Claude Code was amazingly helpful, but I hadn’t really learned anything. There was no challenge. A few simple commands at each version and some QA. I did run into a blocker for about an hour where I saw Claude dig way deeper into the Unity code to fix a bug than I would have. So I increased the scope to improving the User Interface of the menu system and upgrading the graphics.

I write clean, concise code. Throughout the upgrade to version 2 Claude Code amplified my development abilities. That was the reason working with Claude Code was so exciting to me. With clear ideas and a good code foundation, development seemed simple. I saw the possibility to truly finish Stack And Bomb as I had envisioned in 2015.

I found it challenging to trust Claude Code to freely work on my code base. I reviewed every suggestion. I was sure that I was better at coding. I wasn’t. I didn’t realize it until the end of the project, but my coding abilities are useless so long as AI coding agents exist. Clean, concise, well structured code always wins, but later experimentation proved that on smaller projects like Stack And Bomb, human readable code is optional.

Eventually, I adjusted. My focus became creative direction, asset creation, scrum master and Quality Assurance. I was using a Claude chatbot in a Safari browser to help me project manage and create assets. This was prior to Claude Design being available to me, so I was using Adobe Firefly and Photoshop. More effort was spent manually adjusting/creating assets in Photoshop than I wanted or expected. Claude chat and Claude Code were far more impressive at the time than Firefly.

I also added advertising. I didn’t want to spam the experience for the player, but solving monetization is a long time problem I have had. I tried to limit advertising by gamifying it. If the player beats a minimum score on the level, they get to skip the advertising. So far, my advertising monetization is paying off less than selling one copy in 2018…

April 18, 2026 Google Play published version 2.0 saving Stack And Bomb. A week or so later the game reappeared on Apple’s App Store. A week or two later version 2.1 was released after I was informed that I no longer had permission to use the original music and had to create new tracks.

Stack And Bomb was saved. The AI coding experiment was successful in returning my app to the stores, and I learned that my planning, creativity and attention to detail skills are becoming far more valuable than my code writing.

Next post will dive deeper into my experience and learnings from this project.