🧩 Once Upon a Wimmelbild – A Photo Tagging Game

Inspired by Where’s Waldo, this app challenges you to find famous book characters like Rapunzel, Puss in Boots, and more hidden in a beautifully detailed illustration.

I built the frontend with React + Vite and the backend with Ruby on Rails, handling all the character validation, timing, and leaderboard logic through a REST API. The artwork is by the amazing Elijah Haswell , whose whimsical “Once Upon a Wimmelbild” piece gave the project its charm.

This was a really fun project to make — connecting the frontend to the backend, working with coordinates, and debugging CORS issues taught me a lot about real-world full-stack development.

The app was live for a bit (until my free hosting expired 😅), so now I’ve included a short demo video showing how it works instead.