Chaos Booth went from a new idea to a working Android app in two days. That sentence makes the process sound clean and effortless. It was neither. The app moved quickly because I kept the first goal deliberately small: build one complete photo-challenge experience, test it on a real phone and make sure it was genuinely fun to use.
By then, I had already abandoned several unrelated app ideas and settled on something much more playful. Instead of building another utility, I wanted an app that could give people a reason to take ridiculous photos together. The concept was simple enough to explain in one line: choose a challenge, follow a short sequence of photo prompts and let the app turn the results into a collage.
Day one: making the idea real
I began in Unity with a portrait layout designed for a phone. The first important decision was to separate the challenges into two moods. Funny & Friendly would be easy to use with almost anyone, while Wild & Crazy could be louder, stranger and more theatrical. That distinction gave the app a personality before its visual design was anywhere near finished.
The early screens were practical rather than pretty. Buttons were too large, spacing was inconsistent and the hierarchy was not yet clear. But the rough interface answered the questions that mattered first: could I choose a mode, see a list of challenges, open one and understand what the app wanted me to do?
Once that basic route worked, the project stopped feeling like a collection of screens and started feeling like an app. The challenge menu needed titles that were readable at a glance. Each challenge also needed a clear number of photos and a sequence of prompts. I did not want the player to read a long explanation before every shot; the instruction had to be understood in seconds.
Building a reusable challenge flow
The real breakthrough was not one particular screen. It was arranging the experience so that different challenges could follow the same reliable flow. A player selects a challenge, sees the next prompt, starts the camera countdown, takes the requested photographs and reaches a finished collage. The content changes, but the journey remains familiar.
I added countdown choices of three, five and ten seconds because a photo challenge often needs enough time to put the phone down, move into position or make the expression the prompt asks for. After a successful shot, the app can continue to the next prompt. If the result is wrong, Retake interrupts that automatic sequence and gives the player another attempt. That small detail made the process feel much less frustrating in practice.
Most of the challenges use four photographs, although some work better with two or three. That variety matters. A four-shot challenge can tell a tiny visual story, while a shorter one can deliver a faster joke. The collage at the end is not just a record of the session; it is the reward for completing the sequence.
The phone changed what I noticed
The Unity editor was useful for building quickly, but it could not tell me everything. As soon as I put the app on an Android phone, the size of buttons, the rhythm between prompts and the readability of the text became much more obvious. A screen that looked acceptable on a computer monitor could feel crowded in portrait orientation. A button that seemed correctly placed with a mouse could be awkward under a thumb.
That real-device testing guided many of the quick revisions made during the second day. I reorganised screens, simplified choices and kept checking whether the next action was obvious. The aim was not to add as many features as possible. It was to remove every moment where the player might wonder what to press next.
A working app in two days—not a finished design
By the end of the second day, Chaos Booth had its essential loop. I could choose a challenge, take the photographs, follow the countdown and prompts, create a collage and keep the result in My Creations. The photographs and collage processing stayed on the device, which matched the straightforward kind of app I wanted to make: no account and no complicated setup before the fun could begin.
Calling that build “working” is important. Calling it “finished” would be misleading. The mechanics had come together extremely quickly, but I was still not satisfied with the overall visual direction. In fact, the version that followed looked complete enough that I could have accepted it—and I chose not to. I changed the design again before publishing anything.
That decision is one of my favourite parts of this small project. Fast development did not mean that the first acceptable answer had to become the final answer. The two-day build proved that the idea worked. It also gave me something concrete to judge, criticise and improve instead of leaving the concept in my head.
Where Chaos Booth is now
As of 17 October 2026, the final version of Chaos Booth has been submitted to Google Play and is waiting in the review process. The application that reached that stage is visually different from the early Unity screens shown here, but its foundation is the same two-day experiment: short prompts, a camera countdown, a sequence of expressive photos and a collage that turns the session into something worth keeping or sharing.
The next part of this story is about the version I deliberately left unpublished—why it looked promising, why I still rejected it and how that decision led to the final Chaos Booth design.
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