Our own product
Vistazo — an I-Spy arcade in thirteen languages
Built and run by this studio.
Find the named object in a chaotic collage before the clock runs out. That is the whole game, and it works in thirteen languages without a word of translated UI feeling bolted on.
Why the mechanic travels
Most word games can't cross a language border, because the puzzle is the language. Vistazo's puzzle is a picture. The only text is the name of the thing you're hunting — which means the same daily puzzle can ship to the whole planet on the same day, in thirteen languages, with no per-locale puzzle design.
That is a deliberate structural choice, and it is what makes the localisation affordable rather than heroic.
The object pipeline
The game runs on 569 collectable objects, each cut out of a photograph and background-removed so it can be composited into a collage at any scale or rotation.
The source matters: cut-outs come from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, and every single file carries its author and licence through to a credits screen in the app. Building a game on openly licensed imagery is cheap; building one that actually honours the attribution terms is the part most projects skip.
Doing that at 569 objects means the rights metadata has to travel through the whole pipeline — sourcing, background removal, packing, runtime — or the credits screen is a lie.
Four modes off one engine
- Classic — the timed hunt
- Match — find a kind of thing rather than a specific one
- Daily — the same puzzle for everyone, every day
- Zen — no timer, for people who don't want to be chased
Plus a Spydex: every object you spot is collected, so the game has a completion arc underneath the arcade loop.
The streak system, and why it forgives
Daily streaks are the strongest retention mechanic on the web, and the cruellest. Miss one day after a hundred and most games take everything.
Vistazo earns you a Streak Shield every seven days, holds up to three, and spends one automatically when you miss a day. Two missed days in a row still resets it — the mechanic has to mean something — but a single bad day costs you a shield instead of a hundred-day streak.
Streaks also unlock help rather than just status: an extra sonar ping at three days, a time freeze at seven, another ping at fourteen. The reward for showing up is a better run, not a bigger number.
Accounts without passwords
Cloud save exists so a streak survives a new phone. It runs on an emailed code — no password to create, forget, or leak — and the same screen carries sign-out and delete account and data, in the app, not buried in a policy page.
For a casual game played by people who will never read the privacy policy, that is the correct shape: the lightest possible account, and an exit that takes one tap.
What this demonstrates
Localisation as an architectural decision rather than a translation pass; an asset pipeline that carries licensing metadata end to end; retention design that respects the player; and passwordless accounts with a real deletion path.
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