Two games I made with vbgnt went live on the App Store and Google Play this week. Potion Pile is a cozy physics merge puzzle that takes place inside a cauldron. Nine Heavens Ascent is an idle cultivation game about climbing nine realms one breakthrough at a time. Both are free, both are single player, and neither one has ads or in-app purchases.
I have written here before about the studio building the game, and then about it building the store kit. This post is about the part that comes after all of that: what it actually takes to go from a deployed build to a listing a stranger can install, and how much of that the agent handled versus how much was me.
Potion Pile
You slide to aim and release to drop jewel-like ingredients into a cauldron. Matching pieces tumble together and merge, and the merges climb eight tiers, from a Berry up to the Moon Elixir. A recipe card sits at the top of the screen and rotates between Dewdrop Tonic, Moonrise Tea and Starlight Cordial, asking for more demanding ingredients the longer you last. When the ingredients it wants are in the pot, you tap Brew, the recipe bottles for points, and the pile gets a little shorter.
The part I did not expect to like as much as I do is the Stir. Every brew earns one, you can bank up to five, and spending one gives the pile a gentle swirl that jostles everything into new positions. It is the only real escape valve in the game, so the interesting decision is not where to drop, it is when to admit you are in trouble. Keep the settled ingredients under the danger line and the run continues. It plays in portrait and landscape, and it saves your best score.
Nine Heavens Ascent
This one started as a xianxia idle game and stayed one. You begin as a nameless mortal with a few breaths of Qi, tap the sanctuary to gather more, and buy into eight idle sources that keep gathering while you are gone. Nine realms sit above you, each with nine stages, and getting through one means accumulating enough Qi to break through to the next.
At realm boundaries the heavens object. A lightning tribulation starts and you tap the falling bolts to deflect them before the trial runs out, which is the only part of the game that asks for your reflexes rather than your patience. Underneath that there are five Techniques to study, pills to craft for a timed boost, and spirit beast hunts that run on their own and pay in Spirit Stones. Later you unlock Reincarnation: you start another life, keep your Stones and Techniques, and spend Dao Insight on twelve permanent nodes plus a repeatable Samsara wheel. Get all the way to the top and there is a True Immortal ending waiting, with a record of how many lives you lived and how many breaths you took to get there.
What the studio did and what I did
vbgnt wrote both games in Godot from a written brief and a long tail of follow-up prompts, and it produced the store kit for each one: phone and tablet screenshots at the sizes the stores demand, the icons, the feature graphic, listing copy with the character counts already checked against each field, and trailers. It also produced the shippable builds, a signed Android AAB on one side and an Xcode project on the other.
What was left for me was the boring and unavoidable half. The iOS side comes out as an Xcode project rather than a finished build, because the build server runs Linux and an App Store archive has to happen on a Mac, so I set the team and the bundle id, archived, and uploaded. Then the questionnaires: age rating, data collection, export compliance, a support page, a privacy policy. None of that is hard. It is just nobody else's job, and no agent I know of can sign an affidavit about your data practices for you.
What it would not do
My favorite detail from the kit run is a refusal. When the agent recorded the Nine Heavens Ascent trailer, it would not load a prepared save to reach the late game. It played normally, got as far as normal play gets in a recording session, and then wrote in its own delivery notes that the trailer is a fallback cut missing reincarnation and the ending, along with instructions for splicing that footage in later if I wanted it. The screenshots are a different story, and it treated them differently on purpose: those were captured from saves it had actually earned, which is how you end up with a True Immortal screen in the listing but not in the trailer.
That distinction is not one I asked for, and I would not have thought to draw it that carefully. It is the kind of thing I want more of from software that makes claims on my behalf.
Where to get them
Potion Pile is on the App Store and on Google Play. Nine Heavens Ascent is on the App Store and on Google Play. Both are free.
If you want to make one of your own, vbgnt is the thing that built them.