Sandwich Swipe: A two-year side quest to design a cozy mobile game
I’m the designer and illustrator for Sandwich Swipe - a cozy mobile game that landed on the Apple store’s Best New Games list in several countries and has been downloaded by over 10k+ users.
This article covers my design process and main takeaways from designing my first game:
- Deciding on the game concept for Sandwich Swipe
- A deep-dive into the UI design and illustration process
- The hardest parts of designing Sandwich Swipe
Sandwich Swipe is a mobile puzzle game where you swipe different ingredients around a grid and combine them together to create sandwiches. Each level has a menu of sandwiches that you need to make within a set number of moves to complete the level. As you progress through the game, you unlock new ingredients with unique mechanics that make the puzzles more interesting and challenging.
Sandwich Swipe was created by a two-person team that included me as the designer and my studio partner who was the game developer. It is completely free to play and has no in-game purchases which means that we don’t make any money from it. In total, it took us just over two years to make:
- May 2022 — Started working on Sandwich Swipe.
- April 2023 — Alpha release to family and friends.
- Nov 2023 — Beta release to family and friends.
- June 2024 — Started marketing on social media via Tik Tok videos, Instagram reels and YouTube shorts (ideally, we should have started this much earlier).
- July 2024 — Released Sandwich Swipe on the Apple and Google app stores.
Deciding on the game concept for Sandwich Swipe
Our first attempt
Sandwich Swipe wasn’t actually our first attempt at game development. We originally started with a very different ambitious multiplayer game, but got stuck pretty early on and decided to put it on hold. I struggled with animating the complex pixel art attacks, and my studio partner ran into issues with networking and Unity development being challenging.
On reflection, the biggest problem here was that we were trying to do too many new and difficult things for the first time. We instead decided to start with a game that was technically simpler to make which ended up being Sandwich Swipe.
Scoping and refining Sandwich Swipe
The original concept behind Sandwich Swipe was a desktop game where you progress through a dungeon by solving food-themed puzzles. Rather than just swiping to move ingredients, it was a more literal physics-based system with pistons that pushed the ingredients along the row or column.
Over the first month, we spent most of our time narrowing the scope of the game and reducing the implementation effort required by making the following decisions:
- Kept it simple: We simplified the multi-room dungeon concept into a standard level-based puzzle game. This removed complexity like needing a storyline and gameplay between puzzles.
- Added new game elements sparingly: We restricted the game concept to only sandwiches instead of many different types of recipes. We were also very intentional when adding new ingredients ensuring that they had both unique and fun mechanics.
- Mobile-only: The game is only available for Android and iOS. Although cross-platform development is easy to do with game engines like Unity (which is what we used), making responsive UI layouts and tuning touch interactions for different platforms is very time-consuming.
- Single player: We chose a single player game concept because multiplayer adds networking complexity to the entire game architecture.
- Code-only animations: The animations in the game are all implemented through code and not by illustrating them frame by frame to save on illustration time.
Testing our game concept
We wanted to test out our first prototype as soon as possible because no amount of extra features or polish was going to make up for a boring base mechanic.
A core memory from developing Sandwich Swipe was when we asked two of our friends to play through the first few levels we designed. The prototype was composed of a generic level-select screen and a simple game screen (just the menu, board, and the number of moves left).
To our surprise, immediately after letting our friends play the prototype they couldn’t put the phone down. Even after they went home, they insisted on completing the hardest level with pen and paper and sending us screenshots of their solutions to check if they were correct. It was at this point we knew we had a really fun game concept and it was exhilarating to see people having so much fun playing our game!
A deep-dive into the UI design and illustration process
Designing Sandwich Swipe went relatively smoothly, but as expected there was still a lot of iterating. The game screen designs were prototyped in Figma (UI prototyping app), and the illustrations generally started as sketches on paper and transitioned to digital illustrations using Clip Studio Paint (illustration software).
In the Figma project, every page or major state had a corresponding screen. For example, the game-level screen had many different mockups corresponding to all of the possible states: default game state, hovering on the menu, running out of moves, level fail states, level success state, and the settings menu states.
Occasionally, I would mock things up quickly using Facebook Messenger’s photo editing feature to get quick feedback from my studio partner. However, this usually earned me a “that’s cool, but I want a real design” since they actually had to implement it. 😅
Illustration is iterative
It’s easy to get attached to illustrations you’ve spent a long time on, but sometimes for the sake of the game you need to be able to let go and completely rethink something. Our main home page was a good example of a design that went through many major iterations.
The original design concept for the main page started as a quick sketch on paper, then was digitally redrawn. It was the first piece of art that was designed for the game.
Once the main illustration was complete, I played around with many different layouts and colour schemes using either the main image or ingredients images as the focal point. The aim was to convey a warm, cozy, home-chef vibe.
However, after endless combinations, eventually I was forced to admit that the current illustration just wasn’t the one. Firstly, it was the wrong aspect ratio — phone screens are vertical meaning the image had to be cropped a lot to fit on the screen. More importantly though, the illustration felt flat. There was no cohesive colour scheme, and the items all felt separate and spaced too far apart. I wanted something more unified and appealing to draw users into our game, and for this reason, I decided to completely redraw it.
After rethinking the design, I ended up with a much more straightforward image of our main character eating a sandwich. The colour scheme fit the rest of the game a lot more and the character’s design was more unique and distinctive. However, even this was an iterative process and after having the original drawing for a few months, I decided based on feedback that the character felt a little emotionless and uninterested. Once again I decided to make adjustments and ended up changing the character’s eye design.
After learning from the large amounts of wasted work on the home screen, I became more intentional about being iterative in my design process going forward. An example of this was designing the Honey ingredient.
Firstly, I trialed a few different low-fidelity designs: dripping honey from the top, honey around all the sides, and a honeycomb pattern. I made sure not to spend too much time drawing them since they were only placeholders to help decide on the overall direction.
I ended up choosing the dripping honey design because it was easily recognisable as honey, but also didn’t cover too much of the underlying ingredient. After this I redrew it multiple times while iterating on the shape and colours until it finally looked appealing and easy to comprehend at small sizes.
“Make it juicier”
This was a phrase I heard many, many times from my studio partner. Juiciness refers to the small polishes that make a game just that extra bit more fun to play.
Some examples of juiciness that we added to Sandwich Swipe are:
- The cat paw on the game’s title screen is animated.
- When swiping ingredient tiles around the game board, the interactions are tuned to be responsive and satisfying.
- When a game state becomes impossible to complete because not all of the required ingredients are present, the retry button automatically pops out to prompt the user to restart the level.
Juiciness was also a term that came up a lot during the illustration process. Below is a before and after example of the “Out of moves” illustration.
Although it’s largely the same image, the final version looks much more appealing because of small tweaks like making the sandwich thicker and making the outlines darker. My biggest tip for creating juicy illustrations is getting fresh eyes on it because after staring at an illustration for a few hours you become blind to the flaws.
Another way to add visual juiciness to the game is by using decorative elements. One of the examples of this were the banners that we added to the top of the level pop-ups after the alpha release. The aim was to make the pop-ups feel less generic and to also reuse the main character more to make the game look more distinctive. These banners also started as notebook sketches and transitioned to digital illustrations.
Leveraging pre-existing assets
For a year and a half, we used a UI asset pack until we were ready to hand-draw the UI components. This included components like buttons and sliders, and helped us noticeably cut down on the time that it took to reach a working game prototype. By the end of the game, we replaced nearly all of the asset pack components with custom assets to ensure our game matched the cozy style we were aiming for and didn’t look too generic.
The hardest parts of designing Sandwich Swipe
Keeping momentum
You’ll notice the title of this article calls Sandwich Swipe a side quest and not a main quest. This is because both of us were corporate software engineers by day, and game designers/developers by night. By far the hardest part of developing Sandwich Swipe for me was consistently working on the game.
There was a lot of momentum right at the start of the project and whenever we added a new ingredient or feature. However, sometimes months would go by where I wouldn’t make any progress on it and I would struggle to start up again. I tried to combat this by committing to one small task at a time, for example, drawing a single icon, designing part of a game screen, or even just updating our Trello board of tasks. I often found this small amount of progress provided enough momentum to work on bigger tasks again.
What ultimately helped us cross the finish line though was picking a release date for Sandwich Swipe and advertising this on our social media channels. This was an incredibly stressful approach but held us accountable for finishing the first game release by a certain date. It forced us to prioritise what remaining tasks were absolutely necessary for the initial release such as finalising the levels, and what could be included in a later version such as adding game achievements.
Recognising unhealthy patterns
Marketing is an essential part of game development because people can’t play and enjoy the game if they never find out about it. As I expected, it was the most dreaded part of building Sandwich Swipe for me because it’s a slow and sometimes disheartening process that requires a lot of frequent and consistent posting. What I didn’t expect though was that I would immediately become obsessed with it.
After posting my first few Tik Tok videos, I was constantly checking to see if we had new interactions or followers. I was overjoyed whenever the videos got a lot of views in the first hour and distraught whenever they didn’t because it felt like that meant that the game was going to be a failure. This pattern very quickly became stressful and unhealthy.
In the end, I had to pause and remember why I was working on the game in the first place. Sandwich Swipe wasn’t earning any money for us so gaining followers was purely for self-satisfaction and wasn’t going to make or break our game development careers. What I really cared about was making a game that people would enjoy.
A key moment of happiness for me was seeing the reactions of our families and friends when we first released Sandwich Swipe to the app stores. My stepfather would send me weekly reaction videos of my Mum sitting on the couch at home playing Sandwich Swipe. In the videos you can hear her excitedly narrating her entire thought process as she plays through levels. There were a lot of “ooh”s and “aah”s with the occasional “oh goddammit” because she’d run out of moves just when she was about to win.
On top of this, I also had colleagues at work ask me for help on levels they were stuck on, and friends racing to see if they were the first to get a perfect score on all of the levels. It was heartwarming to see so many people having fun playing Sandwich Swipe!
Final thoughts
Designing Sandwich Swipe has taught me a lot about what it takes to transform an idea into a full-fledged game. Now that our first game is released, I’m excited to work on even more ambitious projects in the future. Keep an eye out for updates from Lava Drop studios.
If you’d like to check out Sandwich Swipe, it is available on the Apple and Google app stores. I hope you have as much fun playing it as we did making it! ❤️
