Five Times Pixbu’s Tests Measured the Wrong Thing

I’m a solo dev shipping Pixbu — a self-care app where a pixel creature grows as you look after yourself — for Shipaton 2026. It’s live on both stores in 6 languages with 1,889 automated tests. This post isn’t about the features. It’s about a habit that saved the launch: whenever I caught myself knowing something about my own app, I measured it instead. I was wrong often enough that it stopped being embarrassing and started being a process.

Pixbu’s creature evolves through six stages. Each stage should be visibly bigger than the last — that’s the entire emotional payoff of the app.

I replaced the whole art set. Tests stayed green. Ship it, right?

Then I actually counted the drawn pixels in each stage: baby 6572 → teen 5627 → adult 5840 → elder 6244 → mythic 6338.

The creature shrank 14% at the first evolution— the...

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