Daydream Hero
- Role
- Co-founder and lead developer
- Year
- 2025
- Org
- Independent
A retro-inspired endless runner built with my brother as an indie duo. Started as a RevenueCat hackathon entry and became a real game.
A hackathon entry that refused to stop
My brother and I built Daydream Hero for the RevenueCat Ship-a-ton as a two-person indie team. It should have ended there. Instead it turned into a real game: an endless runner in pixel-art anime, somewhere between Chrome's dino and Temple Run, about running through dreamscapes as a metaphor for persistence.
Everything is handmade: the art, the systems, the sound.
What building a whole product teaches you
A game is not one discipline. It is architecture, interface, economy design, monetisation and community, and with two people you do all of them. We ran on React Native and Expo with Supabase behind it, Clerk for auth, RevenueCat for purchases and AdMob for ads. A production stack for something that started as a weekend.
Early access players shaped the mechanics and the in-game economy more than we did. That is the part I would tell anyone building a first game: your instincts about difficulty and pacing are wrong, and the only fix is putting it in front of people early enough that being wrong is cheap.