01
A Crooked Sticker, A Crooked Shortcut
My name is Pawel. I'm from Warsaw, I'm 60, and for over forty years I carried one odd idea in my head.
It started in 1981, when the Rubik's Cube reached Poland. Nobody knew how to solve it. There were no books, no internet, just rumours. At school, every class seemed to be running its own quiet race to be the first. Then one day a classmate brought a perfectly solved cube and became a legend. For about a minute, though. That is how long it took me to spot one slightly crooked sticker. He had come this close to the perfect crime: fifty-four stickers peeled off and glued back perfectly, except for the one that betrayed him.
While everyone else argued about whether that counted as cheating, I got stuck on a different question: what if the stickers could really move by themselves?
02
The Stubborn Idea
For the next four decades, the idea that would eventually become SkimmIQ simply stayed with me. I worked in IT, but on the business side. My job was to tell programmers what the business needed, and to tell the business what was impossible. When it came to SkimmIQ, I played both roles at once: the business half of me kept asking for it, and the programmer half, which I did not have, kept answering that it could not be done. So the idea landed on a shelf and I kept my day job.
It waited very patiently.
03
The Monkey with a Razor
At the end of 2024 I tried AI for coding, out of curiosity. Within a few days I had a rough prototype of my moving-sticker cube in Python. That was a dangerous amount of hope. Forty years of excuses evaporated in one week.
Then I tried to turn it into a real mobile game, and reality said hello. I had never opened Xcode or Android Studio in my life. I felt like the proverbial monkey with a razor: suddenly equipped, mildly dangerous, and waving it around with far more enthusiasm than method. I had no coding agent working inside the IDE then. My whole development process was an endless rally between a chat window and an IDE: compile, explode, paste the errors back. Repeat until midnight.
It was slow, messy, and often humiliating. Sometimes I felt like I was defusing a bomb by trial and error, half-expecting the whole project to explode with my next click. But I kept going, because the alternative was spending the rest of my life wondering, "What if?" Step by step, the idea became something I could hold in my hand.
04
The Magenta Rebellion
I wanted SkimmIQ to feel familiar, but not like a copy of the Rubik's Cube. So I kept the original logic and the relative positions of the faces - changing too much would only confuse players. But I made one small, deliberate change: orange became magenta.
It was a tiny visual rebellion, a quiet signal that this isn't quite the cube you already know. That one decision later became the heart of the whole brand.
05
The Safety Rope
SkimmIQ turned out to be much bigger than a face-turning cube. The number of reachable states has 39 digits, and every single one of them is provably solvable.
I know that now. While I was building the game, I did not even know whether my own scrambles could be solved, and that itched badly. So I knew SkimmIQ had to have built-in solvers. Not just as help for lost players, but as visible proof, on the screen, that this mess has a way out. Building them nearly broke me, because in this game one wrong move is not "almost right"; it is simply wrong. The breakthrough came from combining fast search with compact AI models, running on the phone.
And here is the strange part. The AI solves it, but I have watched hundreds of its solutions and found no pattern a human could learn. On launch day, r/Cubers members proved that people could solve individual games too. Then Expensive-Bear-1376 cut the human record from 240 to 107 moves and documented the first human approach, now named The Bear Method with his approval. Unlike the AI paths, its order grows visibly layer by layer. What remains open is whether other players can reproduce it, teach it clearly, and close the gap toward the AI's roughly 60 moves. SkimmIQ Lab exists for exactly that work, with shareable states, replays, and an editor. Maybe you will be the one to improve it.
Read about The Bear Method
06
The Romantic Bit Meets the Bill
Leaving a corporate job to finish a game sounds romantic until the server bills arrive. So yes, SkimmIQ has paid options, kept as gentle and unobtrusive as I could make them. If you enjoy the game, you can use them or buy me a coffee. If not, that is completely fine too. The main reward was never the money. Building this game quietly rearranged my life. It gave me more freedom than any job ever did, proof that I can still learn new things, and a working answer to one question: "Isn't it too late?"
It now sits in two app stores.
07
Not Quite Alone
SkimmIQ may be a solo project, but it was never created in complete isolation. I owe a big thank you to the friends who patiently tested the game every day for fourteen days during the Google Play review. And an even bigger one to my girlfriend, who showed remarkable patience while I disappeared into the screen for long hours and left her alone with Netflix.
If you have ever had an idea that felt too strange or too late, and you are still wondering whether to start — write to me. I am not someone who suddenly became an expert. I am just a person who finally stopped waiting. Polish, English or Italian. I reply to everyone.
pawel@skimmiq.com