I Made ArtFall, It’s My Masterpiece

I’ve had this idea rattling around in my head for years. I just didn’t have the skills to build it. With my trust developer partner, Opus 4.6, I could, and I built it. And honestly — it turned out better than I imagined! Meet ArtFall.App.

ArtFall is an iOS-only block-stacking game where each falling piece carries a fragment of a famous painting. Van Gogh. Vermeer. Monet. You’re not just clearing lines — you’re uncovering a masterpiece. I’ve wanted to make this since before I knew how to make apps. Now it’s on the App Store and I cannot stop smiling about it.

The details nobody asked for — but that I lost sleep over:

The notification prompt. Every app has one. That jarring “Can we send you notifications?” moment that kills the vibe. I spent real time on this. Instead of a generic system popup, there’s a liquid glass bell icon that appears contextually — only on the pack download page, only when it actually makes sense to ask. Not plastered on launch. Not interrupting your game. There, when you’re already thinking about new content.

The onboarding has haptic feedback with a drag mechanic I spent hours tuning. Hours. On a drag gesture. Because the first time someone touches your game, it sets the tone for everything that follows, and I wasn’t going to let that moment feel cheap.

And the gallery — the museum backgrounds aren’t just blurred photos. There’s a ceiling light effect, natural light filtering down from above, the way it actually looks when you’re standing in a gallery looking up at something that’s been hanging there for three hundred years. I put that in there because it was the right thing to put in there, and for no other reason.

The landing website is nothing like I’ve built before, it has subtle animations, and it has demos elegantly shown in an iPhone frame. Browse around! – ArtFall.app.

Screenshots:

Three ways to play:

Mystery Mode is the heart of it. Pieces fall, fragments of a hidden painting emerge, and you have to identify the artwork before the canvas fills. The earlier you guess correctly, the higher your score. It sounds simple. It is not simple. The tension between wanting more information and wanting a better score is constant and genuinely addictive.

Canvas Mode is the other end of the spectrum — no guessing, no pressure, just the meditative experience of watching a masterpiece come together piece by piece. I built this for the people who want to be in the art, not racing against it.

And then there’s Challenge a Friend.

I shipped social in v1: Challenge a friend

Challenge a Friend lets you send a game challenge over iMessage or WhatsApp. Your friend sees your score, plays the same puzzle blind, and then you both see the result. No accounts. No friction. Just a link.

I could have cut this. It would have been easier to cut this. Social features are hard — the edge cases stack up fast, the UX has to be airtight, and it’s one more thing that can break. I shipped it in v1 because I believed it was fundamental to what ArtFall is. Some ideas only work if people can share them. This is one of those ideas.

The gallery grows:

Iconic Figures, Great Art — and more packs coming. Every completed artwork unlocks a fun fact about the art and artist. That part wasn’t an afterthought either; if you just spent five minutes uncovering a Vermeer, you deserve to know its story.

I keep releasing new packs every couple of weeks. It’s a really cool system I was able to build where I can keep adding and releasing new packs for the users any time with no dependency on the App Store for free packs. I chose not to make new packs paid but maybe some packs in the future.

Game Center, leaderboards, 8 achievements:

I love collecting PlayStation trophies. So naturally, when I built ArtFall, I went deep on Game Center. I designed 8 custom achievements and I thought hard about what each one rewards — because achievements that just mark time played are boring. Mine reward skill and obsession.

First Masterpiece is your welcome to the club. Complete One Full Pack is where the addiction sets in. But then it gets interesting. Early Guesser gives you credit for under 25%. These aren’t participation trophies — they’re asking you to actually know art or at least have the confidence to commit early.

Two leaderboards — global and friends — so you’re competing against the world and the people you actually know. And all of this is built natively in Swift. No Unity. No cross-platform shortcuts. Pure iOS, using Apple’s own frameworks — Game Center, iCloud sync, haptics, the challenge link rich previews. It feels native because it is.

ArtFall is free on iOS, with no ads at the moment. Download it here:

I’m really proud of this one. A little more than even CyberPrism App.