A project 40 years in the making
My name is Pawel, I'm from Warsaw, Poland. I am almost 60, and for over 40 years I carried the idea for SkimmIQ in my head.
An idea that eventually made me give up my corporate job and changed my life. It gave me a chance to build something truly my own, from the first rough prototype to the final game. And after years inside the corporate machine, it gave me something I had been missing for a long time: freedom, purpose, and the feeling of being alive in my own work again.
So I started SkimmIQ.
And it was one of the best choices I have ever made in my life.
When Rubik's Cube reached Poland in 1981, nobody around me knew how to solve it. Bringing a solved cube to school would have made you instantly famous. One classmate tried to take a shortcut: he could not solve it, so he peeled off the stickers and put them back in the right places. Everyone was amazed, but I noticed the trick because one sticker was slightly crooked. That was the first spark of the idea: what if the stickers themselves could move?
That thought stayed with me for more than four decades. I knew from the beginning that a cube with physically moving stickers was almost impossible to build as a mechanical object. It could only really exist in virtual reality. But for most of my life, I had neither the tools nor the skills to turn that idea into something people could actually play.
Near the end of 2024, I started experimenting with AI, mostly around coding. That is when the old idea came back. When I managed to build a crude basic prototype in Python in just a few days, I realized something important had changed. It was not only the prototype itself. It was understanding what AI could make possible, and how powerful a tool it had become for someone willing to learn, test, fail, and keep going. At that moment, ignoring this opportunity would have felt almost wrong. So I decided to take the idea seriously, shape it into a real game, and finish it.
I had worked in IT, but not as a programmer. I was an ERP implementation manager, so software was familiar to me from a different side. I did not even know Visual Studio Code existed, and when I first opened Android Studio or Xcode, I felt like a monkey with a razor: newly equipped, slightly dangerous, and afraid to touch anything. But it was no longer an excuse. With persistence, slow trial and error, and AI helping me examine each option, I learned to handle those environments and started building a real mobile app.
What followed was closer to a nightmare than a smooth build. There were no coding agents like today. Every line of code meant copying something from chat, pasting it into the project, compiling, copying the errors back, and trying again. I also had to make choices I was not prepared for: 3D libraries for Android, development tools, architecture, stores, testing, and countless small decisions I did not even know how to name at first. Many times I felt like a child lost in the fog. People helped me test, gave feedback and pushed the project forward at key moments. SkimmIQ may be a solo project, but it was never completely solitary.
I also wanted SkimmIQ to feel connected to the familiar cube, but not trapped by it. So I kept the classic color logic and the relative positions of the faces, because changing too much would only add unnecessary confusion for players. But one color had to change. Orange became magenta: a small visual rebellion, and a clear signal that this is not quite the cube you already know. That color later became the lead color of the whole SkimmIQ brand.
I owe a huge thank you to everyone who helped me test SkimmIQ during the Google Play acceptance process. For 14 days, they had to open and click through my game every day. Nobody complained, even though not every tester was necessarily interested in this strange cube of mine. Without them, the Android release would not have been possible. I am also grateful to my girlfriend, who showed enormous patience while I spent long hours working and often left her alone with Netflix.
SkimmIQ is the project of my life. Whether it becomes huge or remains a niche puzzle for curious minds, finishing it mattered. It reminded me that it is never too late to start, that more is possible than we usually allow ourselves to believe, and that dreams do not come true just because we keep thinking about them. They begin to change shape only when we act. For me, that is the real lesson of this project: action is the difference between an idea carried for 40 years and a game people can finally play.
If you have your own idea and do not know how to begin, or if the hardest part feels more psychological than technical, you can write to me. I am still not a deeply technical person, although I have learned quite a lot about working with AI. If you want to exchange a few emails, talk on FaceTime, or meet online, I am open to it. We can talk in Polish, English, or Italian, and I will reply to every serious message about this. You can reach me at pawel@skimmiq.com.
What happens next
The best way to support SkimmIQ is to try the game and share it with someone who likes unusual puzzles. If the story resonates with you, you can also buy me a coffee and support the next steps of the project: improving the game, finding solvers, and seeing how far this strange puzzle can go.