Problem
Wanted to ship a party/social-deduction game (the "spy" genre — one player is secretly the spy, everyone else shares a location, the spy has to bluff their way through). No existing team, no budget, no backend infra — just an idea and evenings/weekends.
Approach
Built solo end-to-end on React Native + Expo, with Supabase handling auth, realtime game state sync, and Postgres for persistence. Realtime channels drive lobby state, round timers, and voting so every player's screen stays in sync without a custom WebSocket server. Kept the stack intentionally small — no separate backend service to operate, just Supabase and the client.
Shipped to both the App Store and Google Play from a single codebase, handling the usual platform-specific pain: push notification setup, store review guidelines for social apps, and Supabase RLS policies to keep game state honest against client tampering.
Outcome
Live on iOS and Google Play. 87,000+ lines of code across the app and Supabase edge functions, built and shipped entirely solo — product, design, engineering, and store submission.
Role
Sole developer: architecture, gameplay logic, Supabase schema and realtime design, and App Store / Play Store release.
What I learned
Supabase Realtime is enough to build convincing multiplayer game state sync without standing up custom infrastructure — the tradeoff is designing RLS policies carefully so clients can't cheat by writing directly to game state. Shipping solo end-to-end also forced ruthless scope cuts on anything that wasn't core to the "who's the spy" loop.
Type: Mobile Game · Year: 2026