Episode Title: AppleVis Extra 109: Interview with Klemens Strasser, Developer of Art of Fauna
Guest: Klemens Strasser, Indie iOS Developer and Winner of the 2024 Apple Design Award
Hosts: David Nason (Dave) and Thomas Domville(AnonyMouse)
Length: \~45 minutes
Episode Summary
In this inspiring and insightful episode, Dave and Thomas speak with Klemens Strasser, the creative mind behind Art of Fauna, a beautifully designed and highly accessible educational puzzle game for iOS. Klemens shares the journey of his app from concept to being honored with an Apple Design Award for Best Design at WWDC 2025.
The discussion touches on accessibility in app development, the importance of inclusive design, how Art of Fauna was built with VoiceOver users in mind, and the motivations that drive Klemens to ensure his apps are usable and enjoyable for everyone.
What Is Art of Fauna?
A nature-inspired puzzle game that lets players:
- Solve image-based or text-based puzzles about animals
- Learn fun facts from 18th- and 19th-century scientific illustrations
- Choose between visual or VoiceOver-friendly game modes
- Experience soothing soundscapes and educational content
Topics Covered
âś… Accessibility and Design
- Klemens’ passion for inclusive app design
- VoiceOver integration in puzzle gameplay
- Importance of building accessibility from the ground up
- Apple’s new “Accessibility Nutrition Labels” and their potential impact
âś… The Apple Design Award Experience
- Klemens shares how he learned he won
- Insights from attending WWDC and being nominated multiple times
- How previous apps (Letter Rooms, Ancient Board Game Collection) laid the foundation
âś… Development Process
- Why Klemens chose UIKit and SpriteKit over Unity
- Collaboration with VoiceOver users and accessibility engineers
- Beta testing and iterative design for inclusive play
âś… Game Structure and Monetization
- 10 free puzzles included
- Five themed puzzle packs available for a one-time fee
- No subscriptions—premium content is pay-once
- Periodic content updates including:
- Friends of Fauna: users upload animal photos to receive monthly puzzles
- Earth Day Bonus Pack: free bonus for bundle buyers
- Donations: 20% of proceeds go to wildlife conservation
What’s Next?
Klemens announces his next indie app: Pocket Shelf – a new reading tracker app scheduled for release alongside iOS 26.
Connect with Klemens
- Website: strasser.app
- Twitter / X: @klemensstrasser
- Blog (coming soon): Posts on Art of Fauna donations and accessibility updates
Final Thoughts
This episode is a must-listen for:
- Indie developers exploring accessibility
- VoiceOver users seeking innovative, inclusive games
- Educators and parents looking for meaningful screen time for kids
- Anyone curious about what makes an Apple Design Award-winning app
Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI Note Taker – VoicePen, an AI-powered transcription app. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.
Dave: Hello there and welcome to another episode of the AppleVis Extra. My name is David Nathan and I am once again joined by my Apple Viz colleague Thomas Domville. How are you Thomas?
Thomas: I'm doing wonderful Dave and I hope you're doing well as yourself.
Dave: Oh, good. Oh, good. Beautiful summer here. So, you know, everyone's happy. So we're here today to talk about a game called Art of Fauna. We're going to speak to the developer called Clements. And yeah, he recently won the Best Design Award at WWDC. So really exciting one because it's a very accessible app.
Thomas: Right. I mean, that's a big deal to be a winner of Apple. And so I am anxious to hear from him what he felt and what he thought of that and lots of questions to ask him.
Dave: Yeah, looking forward to it. So again, the game is called Art of Fauna, if you want to check it out. And without further ado, let's jump into our conversation with Clemens. Hello, Clemens, and welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us.
Klemens: Thank you very much for having me.
Dave: And I want to say congratulations on the award at WWDC. You must be delighted.
Klemens: Yeah, this is still a bit surreal that this really happened. So, yeah, delighted is not even, doesn't feel the joy that I felt after getting this.
Thomas: Now, this is not your first rodeo, is it, Clement? Now, you've been nominated before, right, for Letter Room and Ancient Board Game Collections?
Klemens: Yes. Exactly, have been nominated in 2022 and 2023.
Thomas: But I guess the third time is the charm then. So you are the official winner of that. Now, how did that come about? Did you, I don't know if that's something you kind of register yourself to be in that set of list for them to consider or looking at, see if you would be part of the nominees or is that just out of random that you had no idea they were considering you?
Klemens: Yeah, I did not have any idea. There's no formal way of putting your name forward to that. Obviously, if you release a new app, you can send it to certain people at Apple. But the nomination process for the Apple Design Awards in general is all internal and magic that I don't really know. Yeah. It was kind of out of the blue that I suddenly got a text message from my contact from Apple one day, and then he told me that I was nominated and that I actually won.
Dave: That's cool. That's a heck of an achievement. And to be nominated is amazing. To be nominated three times and win one is phenomenal. Did you get to go over to Pacino for us?
Klemens: Yes. Um, I did plan to go to Cupertino anyway. So, um, this was now my, um, 10 year anniversary of going to WWDC. I left out the years of COVID obviously, but, um, basically any other year, uh, I went over there and I, we already booked the Airbnb, me and a couple of other friends who are also iOS developers. And so I wanted to go anyway. And then I found out that I actually won the Apple Design Award. So it was good that I wanted to go there anyway.
Thomas: That's remarkable. I think it's great. So I am curious, what do you get for being a finalist?
Klemens: So if you win in previous years, they gave away hardware. This year it was basically just a cube. But it's still very, very nice to have the trophy. And you get also a lot of exposure on the App Store. So there is a certain section where they feature all the winners. And also at WWDC, there was a certain side event where people could come up to you and talk to you about your app or game that was nominated or won the Apple Design Award and all of that exposure is basically part of the price and really helps with getting the word out for the project.
Dave: And his emails and everything as well, I think, I believe, I guess, as well. Yeah, so that's really brilliant. It's funny, when I read, I'll be completely honest, when I read the description, I was like, I'm not sure if that's an app I'd be into. And then I downloaded it and I got actually addicted quite fast. So do you want to tell us a bit about the game and what it involves?
Klemens: Yeah. I think I haven't mentioned the name yet. It's called The Art of Fauna. And the game is basically a puzzle game where you learn about animals from all around the world. And when I first created the puzzle game, I wanted to... I started the whole process of building it because I found beautiful animal drawings online that are available for free online because the creators of those drawings are long gone. They made those drawings in the 18th and 19th century for very old books. And I wanted to build a puzzle game around that. But I have a rule when I want to build a new app or game where I want to really make it as accessible as possible, and especially via voiceover. And making a visual puzzle game accessible via voiceover is not super easy. So I had to think twice and have to take a step back, look at a way of how I can make this visual puzzle game accessible. And then I had the idea that I make a two-sided puzzle game. So on one side, you have the image of the puzzle, the animal and on the other side you have a text description of an animal and so if you want to play it on the the image side you can do that but if you're using voiceover for example that reads out the different parts of the puzzle you can go to the text side and puzzle to get and solve the puzzle like a text puzzler instead of an image puzzler if that all makes sense.
Dave: So you are, it's basically a set of tiles. And I guess if you're a visual player and you're using the image, you're rearranging the tiles to make the drawing. Is that correct? And then there's a text. So if you're playing that way, if you're a sighted player and you're playing with the visual game, do you also get those interesting descriptions of the animal?
Klemens: Yeah, you can. As a sighted player, you can also go to the text side and play it on the text side, which many people actually do. But if you're just puzzling together the image, then at the end of the puzzle, you get the full text as well. So after you solve the image puzzle, you get the full description and can read through that.
Dave: Great. And then for people to understand, if you're playing the text version, which is also how you play it as a voiceover user typically, you're rearranging words or phrases to fit together in a sensible way and that tells you about the animal.
Klemens: Yes, exactly. But it was a very interesting thing that I... initially wanted to do this just to make it possible to play via voiceover, but so many people actually play it more, like it to play it more on the text side because then they actually learn something about the animals.
Dave: That's it. It's a great example of when we, you know, and I'm sure this was partly why Apple awarded you is because, you know, it's one of those things that shows when you build accessibility, it's great for everybody, not just for the narrow group that you maybe had in mind originally. That's so unique. I love the idea that...
Thomas: The thought that you put into it, when you had the visual element of the visual puzzles of the actual animal, and then you put the thought of voiceover, the side B, where the sentences and the description of the animal. I am curious, where did the passion of accessibility come in play? Because obviously, the other nominees that we mentioned, Letter Room and Ancient Board Game Collection, were also very accessible. So I'm curious how that came about, what made you so driven and passionate for making the Art of Fauna and your other apps or games so accessible.
Klemens: Yeah, the whole thing started off in 2015, which was actually my first rodeo around the Apple Design Award, because in 2015, I got a student Apple design award for my very first game, which was called Elementary Minute. And this student design award doesn't exist anymore. It was part of the Apple Design Awards in the past, but I think they shut it down in 2016. And the apps weren't held to the exact same standards as the normal Apple Design Award, I would say. But when I went to WWDC with Elementary Minute in 2015, I walked around the venue and I went to different labs, they’re called at the WWDC, where you can talk to engineers and they give you feedback about your apps or answer questions there. And I went to the Accessibility Lab because back then, in 2015, I was 21. I was very new to development, and I had never done anything around accessibility, and I just was curious about the topic. So I went to an engineer who was legally blind, and he said, tried out Elementary Minute. He had some vision but he said he would usually prefer using voiceover using Elementary Minute or playing the game and then he said why didn't I implement voiceover support for Elementary Minute because he said that this would be a perfect example of it of a game that can be made easily accessible and I did not have a good answer to this so I just never thought about adding voiceover support because I was, as I said, new to the space I never really thought about accessibility before and that whole interaction with the engineer kind of stuck with me and made me think that if I don't know about those things then potentially more developers don't know about them. So after talking to him, I went home. I really took the deep dive into accessibility. I got in touch with a visually impaired iOS developer from Germany who helped me guide through making Elementary Minute accessible. And then I put it out there and I got the warmest response that I could ever have imagined. So the nicest of emails that I ever got in my life back then were from people who used VoiceOver to play Elementary Minute. And both the interaction with the engineer and that first response to making it accessible just stuck with me and made me devote a huge chunk of my professional career to this. So after Elementary Minute, I also looked deeper into accessibility in general and into game accessibility in particular. I wrote my master thesis on game accessibility in Unity and I then tried to make my games as accessible as possible. Also with the help of a very good friend who is one of the most fantastic accessibility engineers that I know, who helped me guide through making complicated interfaces more accessible. And yeah, now it's just part of my identity of making apps and games. And as I said before with Art of Fauna, when I start a new project, I always need to have a way or have a plan laid out how I can make it accessible via VoiceOver. And if I can't find a way, then I will just not work on that project and work on something else.
Dave: I love that story. I wish everybody needs to hear that, I think, because it's...
Thomas: Oh, it's never, it's a story that is remarkable because I, I'm with you, Dave. I think you and I are thinking the same thing is that you don't hear that very often. And that is so cool that it took a moment to sit down with an engineer to like click and then say, I want to do this for accessibility where I can't imagine how many people that are at the WWDC probably done the same thing and have not taken off like what Klemens did. And so I think that's so awesome that you wanted to do that and I absolutely loved the different puzzles you have in this Art of Fauna. I'm curious, you mentioned Unity, is this written in Unity?
Klemens: No, it's not written in Unity. I made the first prototype of Art of Fauna, I think, three years ago now, or almost... Yeah, three years ago. And back then, even though I investigated how to make games more accessible with Unity, it's still not... Back then, at least, it was still not super easy. I haven't looked at it too close in recent years. And I always built my games and apps with just native Apple technologies so Art of Fauna is written in UIKit and previous games used SpriteKit which is a 2D game engine from Apple and I usually do that because I want to make the best experience for iOS users and the most accessible experience for iOS users. And that works best if you go with the native technologies. That still means that my games are not available for Android, which is a shame, but I rather have a very good experience for all of my iOS users than have a mediocre experience for iOS and Android users.
Thomas: So that's... I'm glad you mentioned that because You know, Unity is kind of a big thing, and there are some add-ons, obviously, that help with accessibility. But more developers than not that I've talked to said that it's not enough. They still have to create their own coding to make it work exactly that they want to make it voiceover accessible. So, yes, theoretically it does work, but it's not real comprehensive. So that's kind of a bummer.
Dave: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I wonder if someone's actually, given your story, Apple have recently announced that they are adding what they're calling accessibility nutrition labels. Are you aware of that in the App Store? So you'll have, you'll actually say on your App Store entry, you'll say, you know, I'm accessible, this app is accessible with VoiceOver, large text, whatever it might be. Are you aware of that? And do you think that's a good move? Do you think that kind of thing will encourage others to go down the same road that you've gone down?
Klemens: Yeah, so when I was—Apple announced them during Global Accessibility Awareness Day this year. And when the news came out about the nutrition labels, me and another friend of mine, Rob Whittaker, we were sitting around and looking through all the different changes. And we were very excited about many of those things. And I was particularly excited about the nutrition labels. Because in video games, there is often a thing where big companies like EA or others put actual websites out where you can showcase the accessibility features of a game. I try to encourage different people already to do similar things for apps—to make those websites or add the accessibility features in your App Store descriptions because that way people who actually need those accessibility features know if they can actually use the app before downloading it. Because I always think it's like a very weird or horrible first experience. I'm a user who needs to use VoiceOver and I buy a game for eight euros and then I find out that I can't use it. So I encouraged people already to add that information to their App Store descriptions. And now with the nutrition labels, we have one central point where people can look for those different features and immediately find out what features are supported in an app, but also they help you—they nudge you as a developer to think about different accessibility features that you might have overlooked in the past. I think many developers want to have the nicest accessibility nutrition labels they can get and they can only reach that by making their games and apps more accessible. So I at least think it's a very good idea. I talked to somebody from Apple during WWDC who worked on the accessibility nutrition labels and I told her how much I really, really love them and I really hope that they will take off. So I think it's a great idea. But I'm wondering what you guys actually think about that.
Dave: I would agree with you. Something I've been calling for for a long time, really, I've always thought would be useful. And like you say, it's for us as customers so that we know in advance this is an app I can download and spend time even as well as money on. But it's also, yeah, I'm really hoping that it does that piece of encouraging developers, like giving them the nudge, as you said. That's what I'm really hopeful for. And I hope, again, that it's implemented in a way that—I don't know if a developer said their app is accessible but we download it and it's not—that there is some sort of a system in place to make sure, you know, to make sure as well. And I think Apple are going to build it slowly. I think Sarah told us, Thomas, did she? That Sarah Herrlinger—that they're going to be optional to begin with, but later on you're going to have to fill it in, you know, whether you're accessible or not. So I think that would be good.
Thomas: I think it's a good start as well. I completely agree with that. It's just, I've already seen it in iOS 26. When I go to the App Store, I can see some of the apps—some of the developers are actually taking advantage of that and that's encouraging. So it's promising. I'd like to come back around to the Art of Fauna itself. Where does the idea of Art of Fauna come from? I mean, that is a very unique kind of a puzzle, how you did that. And so I'm curious, what made you think about it and that you said, I want to do something like that, that'd be something different?
Klemens: Yeah, for me, it was really when I—one day I was just stupidly scrolling through social media and I found those wonderful old animal pictures and I just couldn't stop scrolling through them because I was fascinated by the heritage of them and the unique style of those things. And I wanted to build something around it. And I was always fascinated by nature and thought that this would be—like finding this data set of the very old images—would be a great start to actually build something around this or around nature. And I'm also—if you look at my other apps and games, they often have an educational touch. And yeah, just seeing those images and thinking of it, I wanted to build this puzzle game, give it a little bit of an educational spin, make it accessible. And yeah, that's kind of how it just started off.
Thomas: Well, I can tell the passion behind it because when you play it, obviously I can't see you visually, but I can imagine—I'm sure there are gorgeous pictures of the different variety of animals. But not only did you do that, but you also incorporated nature noises. So there's sounds and there's not just the education portion of it, but also what I found really fascinating—and you don't ever see this, or at least I have not seen this ever before, so you're the first I've seen this—that portion of the proceeds that we purchase into the packet, because you have the puzzle packet, and we can talk more about that, but you donate a portion of that for Nature Wildlife Preserve, is that right?
Klemens: You're right. I'm giving away 20% of the proceedings from Art of Fauna to nature preservation organizations. This came about because I got the content—the images of the game—for free and I didn't want to just take that for free. I wanted to give something back. And the idea is that every six months, two organizations get 10% each of the proceedings from the Art of Fauna and I actually donated yesterday the first batch of the proceedings to two different organizations and it was around 2,200 euros each that I donated to them and they will write me back what actually happens with the money and I will write a blog post about all of that in the future. I'm just very happy that I can take my little puzzle game and help at least for a little bit to ensure that our nature is preserved in the future and the beauty of our nature is preserved in the future.
Thomas: That is cool. I love what you've done there. And I want to make an emphasis on that because I think that's so crucial, important, right, Dave? I mean, you don't hear developers do that.
Dave: Yeah, no, it's absolutely brilliant. And yeah, great to see a developer doing that. And it's an educational game as well. It's fun, but it's a game that I kind of would feel comfortable giving to my nieces and nephews or would like to give to them even to say, hey, go and enjoy this game in an era where we're trying to not give them screens too much. This is the kind of thing you are happy to let them play. And then knowing as well that some of the money... the money's going to a good developer who's thinking of us as users in the accessibility space and going to a developer who's passing some money on to a good cause as well. So it's great. Exactly.
Thomas: You're doing a good cause for a developer and what you're doing for a charity. And so let's talk about the puzzle pack. So Art of Fauna, I believe, is free to download. Is that right?
Klemens: Yes. The first 10 puzzles are free in there.
Thomas: Okay, so the first 10 puzzles are free. So you have a collection of puzzles that we can download additionally for a nominal fee. Is that right?
Klemens: Yes. You can either buy each pack of puzzles, which is 20 puzzles each. You can buy them separately for \$2.99, if I'm not mistaken. Or you can pay \$8.99 for all of those five puzzle packs. And I actually added one bonus puzzle pack a couple of months ago to celebrate Earth Day. And this puzzle pack was given away for free to all of the people who bought the puzzle packs before. And there will be another new one coming out later this month, which is also then given away for free for everybody who bought the bundle before.
Thomas: Okay. I was going to ask about that. If you had bots, is this going to be a growing thing? Are you going to introduce packs every so often, or is this just a five-time thing and just some new things along the way?
Klemens: I'm planning to, at least for the rest of the year, put out a few more of those puzzles and add them for free on top of the first bundle. Eventually, since I don't have any recurring revenue, it's a single payment and it's not a subscription, which I'm not always a huge fan of. Because of that, I will introduce in the future another big bundle of more puzzles, which will be paid. But for now, for the near future, more puzzles will be added to the bundle.
Thomas: I saw something about Friends of Fauna, what is that?
Klemens: Yes, this is exactly the thing where I release one puzzle each month with Friends of Fauna. The idea came from another good friend of mine who said that I could start a service where people can actually upload pictures of their pets or of animals that they saw in the wild or of their support animals and send those to me and as a gift of gratitude they get a puzzle for that—for sending me those pictures. But also based on those pictures that I got every month I will select one of them and base a puzzle of one of those pictures and give it to all the Friends of Fauna. So all the Friends of Fauna basically get one new puzzle every month and you can just join there for free. The only hurdle you have to join the Friends of Fauna is that you have to upload the picture of an animal, but it can be any animal.
Dave: That's good fun. Is that within the app or how do you get involved with that or is it a separate app?
Klemens: It's within the app, it's in the settings screen. There is a little section called Friends of Fauna, and you have directly the form there to upload the picture. And this is, for me also, one of the most fun features, I think, that I ever built because people are uploading the images of the animals, but they are also required to write an alt text to all the pictures that they upload. And they sometimes do it as I intended to—that they describe what is exactly on the picture—but often it's just a text about how they praise how cute their dog is or how cute their little cat is. And it's just pure joy to read through them every day and to look through the pictures that people upload there.
Thomas: Wow, support dog. I see that just the thought again—not only just upload a nature picture of what you want, but also send a picture of your support dog or your support animal. That's just amazing. So I have to ask, do these puzzles get tougher, easier, or are they all pretty much the same, equal?
Klemens: So for VoiceOver users more or less the same in difficulty. They get a little bit tougher because the text descriptions get longer in later puzzles. So you have more tiles that you have to rearrange. If you play on the image side, they are also split in even smaller pieces. But the problem there is why this is not done the same way for VoiceOver is that then words are sometimes separated, or the picture is split in certain places where VoiceOver wouldn't read the parts of the word out perfectly or in a way that it's really understandable or easy to play. So I decided against making too small pieces for the VoiceOver puzzle. And I tested that out with several VoiceOver players, and we decided that this is kind of the best approach to that. So they do get a little bit harder, but not super hard.
Dave: Yeah, that makes sense because you're dealing with kind of sentences and parts of sentences and you have to be able to fit them together in a way that's logical. So there has to be, yeah, there's a limit to how small the segments can get, I guess. So you've basically built two games in some way.
Klemens: In kind of way, I did, yeah.
Thomas: That's awesome. Yeah, you're right. It is kind of like two games. Okay, so is this just for the iOS you mentioned? Does this work on—I have to ask—will this work on the iPad? And can you port that over to Mac?
Klemens: So it is also working on the iPad natively. So there is a version of the iPad that I built and that I tested out heavily. You can also play it on a Mac because you can basically start any of—if you have a certain kind of Mac model, which has those Apple Silicon chips and not the old Intel Macs, those Macs with the Silicon chip can run iOS applications. And so they can run Art of Fauna up there. And this is working well, I think. I played it a little bit, but it's not hugely officially supported. People play it on the Mac sometimes, but it's not a separate Mac version. But the better tested and separate Mac version is coming out in the future. Same thing is true for Apple Vision Pro.
Thomas: That's really cool. Okay, that's very nice to know. So when you come to test these things for accessibility, you mentioned you have some friends that are more advanced in the area to help you out. Is that something you do personally, or do you get beta testers, or how do you determine that everything is perfect and laid out and spoken right and mechanically works well?
Klemens: So for accessibility testing and VoiceOver testing in particular, I, over the years, developed, I think, a good feeling of what could theoretically work and what not. So the first thing I do is to make it as accessible as possible in my point of view. So I try to make it as good as I can. And then I go to friends that I met over the years who use VoiceOver day by day and give the app to them and ask for their opinion on it. And I also have some other friends who are more on the engineering side who built a bunch of accessible experiences who also test it out and help me throw ideas back and forth to make it more accessible. But yeah, it's both engineers who are very well acquainted with accessibility technologies who help me test that out, but also people who actually use VoiceOver day by day who are in the beta group on TestFlight that I can just upload a build to and get their feedback.
Dave: What's quite nice as well is that you've got options in there as well. So when you first download the game, you're shown the accessibility options, but also within VoiceOver, you can choose, do you want to have an additional label in each one and what order of speech you want as well. So the fact—I don't know if that came from your own thoughts or from the beta testing group or what—to kind of give people some of those choices about how they want VoiceOver to work.
Klemens: That exact VoiceOver thing came actually from me testing it because I noticed that it's quite cumbersome if the whole text has to be read out every single time. Especially if you play a little bit longer, then you already know the different starts of sentences. I came up with the idea of adding those additional labels and then gave it to my VoiceOver testers and they liked them very much. So I kept them in.
Dave: Yeah, I turned off the ABC piece myself already, but I can see why some people would like them. So yeah, it's great to have those options.
Thomas: As a developer, you kind of knocked off some of the things on the list I would think you probably would want to express. And that question to you is, as a developer yourself and as a winner—and not just... I mean, the Apple Design Award winner is... It's a tremendous honor—but you just constantly back to back to back created these fantastic games and apps that work so well with VoiceOver. If there are developers that are listening in, what recommendation would you tell them? Because some of the things you mentioned, I think you probably—social networking sounds like a big thing because you want to expand and so you can talk and have people test it with you and things like that. What other things could you offer for developers that might be listening to consider and what they can do to make their apps or games more accessible?
Klemens: I think the most important thing for many developers is that they need to start small. So they need to start with one screen at a time to make it more and more accessible. Often when I previously started my job at a company that I'm not longer working with, when I first looked at the project and the VoiceOver support was not super well done there, I felt kind of overwhelmed. And I hear that very often from other developers—that they are overwhelmed, that they don't know where to start. And you need to start slowly. You need to start screen by screen, make it more and more accessible. And there are tremendous videos from Apple around the topic of accessibility, but there are also amazing talks about accessibility out there. For example, one from Rob Whittaker about hands-free touchscreens, which is an amazing talk. And so just look online. You will find the resources that you need to get started and then start slowly and make slow progress of making it more and more accessible. And for me personally, when I made my first little bit more complex game accessible, which was SubWords, I also made the first implementation for VoiceOver accessibility, but I didn't know if that actually works well for people who use VoiceOver day by day. So after I finished the implementation with what I thought was pretty good, I wrote a blog post on AppleViz back then or a forum post about SubWords at the AppleViz forums and asked if somebody wants to help me out beta test this. And I got a tremendous response back then and had so many people who tried it actually out and who helped me figure out the more difficult VoiceOver bugs. And some of those people are still in the beta group that test out my VoiceOver newest creations.
Dave: Great to hear.
Thomas: Yes, absolutely.
Dave: And I think you mentioned earlier as well you got support from other developers who have experience in it and I'm sure that's really important as well—that kind of supporting each other.
Klemens: Yeah. And I think if anybody has a question and I can help them with, I'm also reachable over social media. I am happy to give any pointers to people to help them get started with accessibility and to help them out.
Thomas: Well, the only last question that I have, and I'll hand it over to Dave, is that as a winner—you finally got that trophy, you finally got that achievement, you're like the top of the world now. And I'm sure a lot of developers probably don't like to hear this—but what's next? How are you going to top that?
Klemens: Yeah. So right now I'm building a new app—a reading tracker app. I'm not sure when this is going to be released, the podcast episode, but I think I can already mention the name of that because we're going to announce it on Friday, which is two days from now. And I'm building a reading tracker app with a friend of mine, which will be called Pocket Shelf. And we will talk about what makes it more special in the future. But this is now my main focus and we want to release it—me and Frank—for the iOS 26 release in September. And additionally to that, I have some other projects that I always wanted to do over the years and I never had the time because I was always working with companies and building my games and developing my apps on the side. But at the end of last year, I went full indie and I now have the time to actually focus on those projects. So I think over the last couple of years, it always took me like one or two years to actually release an app or a game. And now I have the time to do that far more frequently. So Pocket Shelf is definitely next, but there will be more projects after that. And I think even soon after that.
Dave: Amazing. We’ll look forward to hearing more about those for sure. Thank you. And yeah, I think that about does us, Thomas?
Thomas: I believe so. I mean, it sounds like you've got a busy life going on there, and congratulations on going full-time indie. That must have been frightening at the same time, because now you're at the mercy of users supporting you. And you're doing a fantastic job, and what you've done with Art of Fauna is amazing, so I can't wait to see what you've got up your sleeve for future projects.
Dave: Thank you very much. Just encourage people to go check out the game. Again, it's called Art of Fauna. Available on iOS. Free download. You get 10 puzzles up front for free. And then you can buy more puzzle packs if you like. So go enjoy the game. And Klemens, huge thank you to you for joining us. And Thomas, thanks for joining me as host.
Klemens: Thank you for having me. Bye-bye.