Brian Weiss is a software engineer from Spring Hill, Tennessee. He built an entire iOS children's storybook app for his daughter (characters, scenes, outfits, and all) with Neolemon as the art engine. The app just launched on the App Store.
A Daughter Who Loves to Dress Things Up
Brian didn't set out to build an app. He set out to create something for his daughter.
She loves stuffed animals. She loves dressing them up, changing their outfits, telling little stories about them. Brian and his wife are deliberate about screen time. They don't want their daughter parked in front of a screen for hours. But they also wanted something she could interact with that felt calm, personal, and genuinely made for her.
That was the idea: a low-stimulation storybook app built around her stuffed animals, with characters she could recognize and stories she could help create.
What Brian didn't expect was how central Neolemon would become to making it all real.
The Character Problem (and the Photoshop Solution)
Brian is a software engineer by trade, not a game developer. Building for iOS using SpriteKit was new territory. So was creating illustrations from scratch.
He used Neolemon to generate all the character and scene graphics. But to make the characters move inside the app (a little idle animation, an expression change when you tap them) he needed to break each character apart. Head. Body. Left paw. Right paw. Tail. Eyes. Mouth.
He took each Neolemon-generated character into Photoshop, separated the pieces, and defined their positions in resource files that SpriteKit could read. Then he told Claude Code what he was trying to accomplish, and the two of them built the animation system together.
"I basically started with an iOS app, told it what my goal was, and how I wanted to approach it," Brian said. "I didn't have to actually do any of this stuff. I just told Claude Code my expectations."
The result: stuffed animal characters that sit, react, and change expressions, brought to life by a developer who'd never shipped a game before.
Low Stimulation, by Design
The design choices in Stuffies Storybook are intentional in a way that most children's apps aren't.
The colors are muted. The animations are gentle. The sounds are soft. There's no rapid-fire interaction, no bright flashing rewards. The whole experience is built to be something a child can pick up, spend a few minutes with, and put down without a meltdown.
"I don't want them to have those things just earlier in life. It's really tough on their brains," Brian said. "This isn't meant to be something they sit in for hours. They come in, check on their stuffed animals, change their outfits, read a story. And then they're done."
Brian used Neolemon's illustration style options to find a watercolor aesthetic that matched the soft, hand-crafted feel he was after. The characters don't look like polished 3D renders. They look like something a thoughtful parent might have drawn, which is exactly what Brian was going for.
Scenes, Backgrounds, and the Prompting Learning Curve
For backgrounds, Brian started with Krea.ai to build the initial environments, then brought those into Neolemon to shift perspective and adapt them for different scenes. He'd describe a scene (a garden, a close-up of a flower bed, a character next to a tree trunk) and adjust until the composition felt right.
The most challenging part wasn't the technology. It was learning to prompt precisely enough to get what he had in his head.
"Sometimes I forgot something, or I used something ambiguous and it got interpreted differently," he said. "But if I can take the resulting picture and Photoshop it, or use parts and pieces from different ones, I can usually compose what I want."
He got comfortable treating each generated image as raw material. Not every output is the final piece. Sometimes it's a background you crop. Sometimes it's a character pose you combine with a different expression. The creative work is in the composition.
He also noticed something that will be familiar to anyone who's worked with multi-character scenes: the more characters, the harder it gets. Getting a raccoon, a squirrel, and a mouse into the same scene while keeping all three looking like themselves took patience, iteration, and more than a few Photoshop passes.
Built for His Daughter, Tested by His Daughter
Brian's daughter is one of his most useful testers.
Every time he does a build, it goes out to TestFlight and she can pull it down. She catches things Brian would never notice. Kids always latch onto details adults walk right past.
She's also part of the creative process going forward. Brian plans to have her help write some of the stories. She can sit with him, describe what the stuffed animals are doing, and he can turn that into a scene. The app becomes something they're making together.
That's a different relationship to creative tools than most people have. Brian isn't using Neolemon to publish books or build a business. He's using it to make something his daughter will want to hold onto.
From Concept to App Store
Stuffies Storybook launched on the App Store in March 2026. Brian kept the initial release deliberately simple: a handful of characters, their stories, their outfits, with plans to release roughly one new character per month, each with four stories and a dedicated environment.
His roadmap for each character release: the character itself, its outfit variations, four complete stories, and a background world to inhabit. Once the process is smooth, each release should be manageable alongside a full-time job.
He's keeping the app free. No paywall. Possibly ads someday, possibly a small in-app purchase for new character packs, but Brian isn't building this for revenue. He's building it because he wants his daughter to have something made specifically for her, and because the process of making it has been genuinely fun.
"It's really just something I can do with my daughter until she decides she's onto something else," he said. "And then I'll maintain it, or find someone else to maintain it."
Brian left a review on Trustpilot that captures it well.
The Bigger Picture
Brian Weiss isn't a children's book author. He's not publishing on KDP or building an Etsy shop. He's a developer who used Neolemon as the illustration engine for a complete, shipped product, one that's now available for any parent to download and use with their kids.
That's a different kind of creator story. But the core of it is the same as every story we share here: someone had an idea for something personal and meaningful, and they found a way to bring it to life.
The app is real. The stuffed animals move. The stories are there. And somewhere in Spring Hill, Tennessee, a little girl is changing her favorite character's outfit and asking her dad what happens next.
Stuffies Storybook is available now on the App Store for iPad. All character art was created using Neolemon.
Want to build your own illustrated story, for a book, an app, or just for the people you love?