Paddock: Horse Racing Game

Paddock is a single-player, offline horse racing prediction game for iOS. Each race card shows 6-10 horses with real form: last five results, ground and distance preferences, running style, training notes and stable news of varying reliability. You pick a winner (or the first two or three in order), then the race plays out in pixel art with live commentary, photo finishes and a camera that follows your horse. Right picks score points based on the odds; wrong picks score zero. No real money, nothing to cash out.

The simulation is deterministic, so a missed pick can always be explained: the prices you see come from the true race model distorted by a market error, and reading the card is how you find the gap.

How it was built: solo, in Godot 4.7 / GDScript, written with Claude Code. That covers the race simulation and odds model, a guided first race, 85 automated tests, five languages, and the whole App Store release pipeline (build, sign, upload, metadata, submission) scripted against the App Store Connect API. The pixel art, store screenshots and short videos are generated by Python scripts rather than drawn by hand.

One lesson: my first submission was rejected by App Review over simulated gambling, so the economy was rebuilt around tickets and points that only ever go up. Nothing is staked, nothing can be lost.