Guess'em

Guess'em is a two-player guessing game along the lines of Guess Who. I think it was my second iOS App, and at last count it had well over a million downloads.

I rebuilt it from scratch in SwiftUI for iPhone and iPad. The original Objective-C app is still in the repository, but none of its code is in the new one — only the character artwork carried over, the same SVGs copied across byte for byte.

It's entirely free now. All 15 packs and 360 characters are bundled in the app, so there's nothing to download and nothing to buy. There are no ads, no accounts, no analytics and no network calls at all — a round lives in a JSON file on your device and nowhere else.

The part that took the real thinking was accessibility. A game where you identify people by how they look is close to the least accessible format there is, so every character now carries a written description of its appearance, reachable through a VoiceOver action or a long press. Hidden secrets expose neither their name nor their description, so the assistive layer can't leak the answer the way a careless implementation would. Cards announce their own state, and at large text sizes the columns widen and the controls shorten rather than everything simply growing until it no longer fits.

There's a small trick in the endgame too: when a player makes their final guess, the app asks the opponent to confirm it rather than checking the guess against the secret itself. The device never needs to compare the two, so it can't give anything away.

The first version was Objective-C, and the character packs were something you downloaded rather than something that came with the app.