Three Games and One Emoji Libary

My kid asked me to make a game for her, not to download but to create, so I fired up Claude Code and after an evening, produced three games all of which you can now play on your phone.

Tap Tap Blocks ( https://hodgson.ai/games/taptapblocks/ ) is built from a nine-tile grid of animals, all of which respond when you tap them, and a MAGIC button, because every game needs one. And that’s all there is to it – because that’s all there should be to it, for a little girl.

Emoji Wonderland ( https://hodgson.ai/games/emojiwonderland/ ) has six realms – garden, ocean, space, jungle, food, animals – and you get to pop the emojis and drag them around to gather them – it was my favourite game to make, which is not always the case.

and Lucky Vegas ( https://hodgson.ai/games/luckyvegas/ ) has five reels, a paytable, an auto-play function, and a $50,000 jackpot of entirely fictional cash, for which I am grateful, as I was the only one playing. But it was using Twemoji that made them feel like real games, and not just crude experiments with clip-art.

THE TWEMOJI PART

Twemoji is the open source emoji project which Twitter released under a creative commons licence – it’s the same images you know and love (or tolerate) but downloadable as a folder of SVGs.

The situation is more precarious than it should be – because emoji look different on every platform. Apple’s cat is not Google’s cat is not Samsung’s cat. So if you make an app that uses the native emoji characters, you end up shipping slightly different versions of the same thing to everyone who plays it – and you have no idea which one they actually saw.

But they sorted it all in about ten minutes. All the animals, all the cakes, all the rainbows turned into something uniform, which I could scale and animate and drop shadows on. No illustrator, no budget, no legalised issues – just a note in the footer saying this was done with Twemoji. A tiny difference between something that looks homemade and something that looks like it came out of the app store.

In summary, we build custom web applications, tools, and interactive experiences – both the utilitarian and the fun. If you have an idea that you’ve been talking through with friends but no actual prototype yet, we’d love to help. Just get in touch at https://hodgsonagency.com/contact

Emoji artwork by Twemoji ( https://github.com/jdecked/twemoji ), licensed under CC-BY 4.0.