AnimeGuesser: The Little Side Project I Built for Fun

Note: this is from 2024, a quick high-level writeup of one of my side projects, posted for the archive.

Hey everyone, Romel here. Most of my side projects start the same way: I'm doing something I enjoy, I think "this would make a fun little app," and a few evenings later there's a half-built thing on my laptop. AnimeGuesser is exactly that. It's a small web game built around guessing the anime, made mostly because it sounded fun to build and fun to play.

I'm keeping this one high level on purpose, because the point of AnimeGuesser was never to be a serious product. It was an excuse to build something playful in a space I actually care about. Anime is something I come back to again and again, so turning it into a little guessing game felt like the kind of project I'd keep poking at instead of abandoning after a weekend.

On the build side, it's the usual suspects for me. Next.js with TypeScript for the app, and Contentful as the backend holding all the anime data. Nothing exotic, which is the whole idea. When the boring parts are already decided, all the energy goes into the actual fun of the thing, the game logic, the feel, the little details that make people want one more round.

The reason these projects matter to me isn't that any one of them takes off. It's that the cost of starting is low enough that I'll actually do it, and every now and then one of them turns into something I genuinely enjoy maintaining. AnimeGuesser is firmly in the "built it because I wanted to" category, and that's enough.

If you're into anime and want to see how badly you do at recognizing shows you swear you've seen, give it a go. And if you build your own little games like this, I'd love to hear about them. Drop it in the comments or find me on Discord.