How a ping button became Red Reaction

Dear devlog,

Every good game has an origin story. Some start with a grand vision, a pitch deck, a carefully researched market gap. Red Reaction started with me wondering what would happen if I tried this "vibe coding" thing everyone keeps talking about, and then building the dumbest app I could think of.

Step one: a button that goes ping

That was the whole spec. A button. You press it. A ping sound goes off. No levels, no score, no story, no plan. It was less a game and more a very small, very confident doorbell.

And honestly? It was strangely satisfying. I pressed that button more times than I'd like to admit, purely to make sure the ping was still working. (It was.)

Step two: showing it at work

The sensible thing to do with a button that pings is to keep it to yourself. I showed it to a colleague instead.

I braced for polite confusion. What I got was: "You can definitely publish that. Just make a leaderboard for it, so people can compete."

Which is a very good point, and also the moment my ping button stopped being a joke and started being a project. Thanks, colleague. You knew exactly what you were doing.

Step three: friends only, please

A global leaderboard is great for the "am I fast?" question. But the question I actually care about is "am I faster than you?" Nobody wants to lose to a stranger with a suspiciously good reaction time. They want to lose to their friends, so they can hear about it for weeks.

So the plan grew a second leaderboard type: custom ones, where only your friends can compete. Your own little arena, for settling scores that were never that important in the first place.

Step four: it needs to be a game

By now a single ping button wasn't going to carry a leaderboard. It needed to be an actual reaction game. So the button multiplied. Now there are four of them, and one lights up. You hit it fast. That part is simple.

Then I started adding twists and turns to the buttons. I won't spoil every one here, but "which button do I press" turned out to be much harder once the buttons stopped behaving. The levels also speed up, all the way down to 0.15 seconds, with no cap. You are welcome, and also I'm sorry.

Step five: wait, this is a trainer now

Somewhere in the middle of all this, the game quietly turned into something else. Once you're tracking your reaction time anyway, it's a short step to asking "am I getting faster?" So now there's a Training Record, which shows your average reaction over the last 14 days. It's a reaction trainer that happens to be a game, or a game that happens to be a reaction trainer. I've stopped trying to decide.

Where things stand

From one ping button to a reaction game with speeding-up levels, a training record, and (soon) global and friends-only leaderboards. Not bad for something that began as an experiment.

The global and friend leaderboards are still on their way, and Red Reaction is being built for iOS first, with Android to follow. I'll keep posting here as things happen.

Until then: go press something and see how fast you are.

— Zeroskills Jussi