Releasing Piskvor Prime: A Five-in-a-Row Game with Personality
Piskvor Prime is an iOS game I developed last month and succesfuly launched on appstore. TestFlight it or support me by buying it here.
The Beginning: Just an AI Engine
Piskvor Prime started as a hobby project — a simple AI engine for five-in-a-row (also known as Piskvorky in Czech). I was experimenting with heuristic-based move selection in minimax and had no intention of turning it into a game but once the AI started playing decent moves, I decided it would be a pity to shelve it.
Piskvorky with Attitude
Most puzzle games are quiet, but I wanted mine to talk back.
So I gave the AI a voice. Not just any voice — one that taunts you when you make a mistake, gloats when it wins, and occasionally glitches out mid-thought. Over time, I prompted an LLM to wite hundreds of reactive phrases, ranging from sarcastic remarks to cryptic comments hinting at a deeper backstory. I used iOS audio sync engine to give Piskvor a voice. iOS does not have any robotic voices, but IN-EN accent suits him quite well.
Art Style, Aesthetic and Lore
I went for a clean pixel art aesthetic that wouldn’t get in the way of gameplay. The board is minimalistic, but the UI has subtle animations, glitch effects, and a terminal-like interface. As you play more games, Piskvor Prime begins revealing snippets of lore — corrupted logs, developer notes, and strange inscriptions on a mechanical door. The deeper you go, the more questions arise. Why is it obessed with shrimp? What happened to the original dev team?
Building the Game
I built Piskvor Prime using Swift and SpriteKit, with all game logic written from scratch. The AI uses a minimax variant with top-k move pruning, and the whole project was developed solo in my free time. It was surprisingly difficult to get the AI right and it is by no means perfect, but I think that it is just about the right difficulty for it to not be boring.
Key systems:
- AI Engine with taunting & evaluation heuristics
- Dynamic log system that displays taunts, messages, and lore
- Procedural inscription system for the mysterious door
- Speech synthesis for an optional robotic voice
Challenges
The AI runs on a separate thread and the early version of the game had a subtle racing condition, a bug I found hard to reproduce. That is hopefully gone in version 1.1. Balancing the AI so it felt fun but not unbeatable took a lot of iteration. TestFlight helped me catch edge cases and polish the UI - thanks to all the testers!
Launch & What’s Next
Piskvor Prime is now live on the App Store. I’m proud of how it turned out — not just a puzzle game, but a small narrative experience and people seem to be having fun. The game is by no means perfect and you can give me some feedback on TestFlight. If you like the game, you can also support me by buying it here.
I hope that it will make you laugh!
Built by a solo developer who did not want to shelve another project.