A game that almost died during Covid and how I made it an app

It's not hard to imagine the criticism if the situation were different. Imagine the headline "How my startup will save millions of companies on the brink of death by providing a way to have meetings remotely". The expected response would be "What about Zoom?".

> The game that almost died

The author meant: "The game my friends and I had to stop playing because of social distancing"

To the reader sounds like: "The game that everybody in the world stopped playing"

> my friends and I used to love playing a nameless pen-and-paper game

Meant: "my friend and I did not use/know/have a name for this game, we just call it 'the game'"

Sounds like: "this game has no name; nobody else in the whole world plays it"

> I thought building a version of the game might be a good creative outlet.

Meant: "I like building games and making a clone of this would be fun!"

Sounds like: "I did not bother to check google, so I had to build one myself."

> proved good enough to spread organically through friends for the next few months

Meant: "My friends liked it"

Sounds like: "None of my 'friends' told me I copied a well known game"

> Writey Drawey might not have existed without the digital shift we’ve made over the last year

Meant: "If not for pandemic, I would not have made this thing"

Sounds like: "I am unaware this game already existed in many forms"

I built something similar during Covid, another parlour game we call “Colander of Death” (it probably has many other names). It’s never gonna go viral but we had fun with it.

I am morbidly curious if the simple website ads are sufficient--unlike myself and this author, they clearly have a lot more than just one person working part-time on their version, so presumably it brings the company money somehow.