How I brought a ten-year-old SpriteKit game back to the App Store: 588 compiler errors, a lot of deleted code, and what AI was actually good for.

In 2016 I shipped a small arcade game for iPhone and iPad called Coocader . It had some ads, never really took off, and I moved on to other things. The code sat untouched for almost ten years.

This autumn I decided to bring it back. Not as a remake, but as the same game, modernized properly. A few weeks later, version 1.1 is live on the App Store. This is the story of how that went, what broke, and what working with AI as a pair programmer was actually like.

The game in one paragraph

Coocader is inspired by Space Invaders, with one twist: blocks with silly little faces move down toward your ship, and you can only destroy a block with a shot of the matching color . So you're constantly switching colors while aiming. Some blocks have shields, some shoot back, some drop gifts that help you… or ruin your run.…