It started simple: catch a funny nickname spotted in some other game, photograph it into a card, let other people vote to rank it, and collect the results.
Everything got built first
Nothing was left out. Reading text off a photo to make a card, showing two cards side by side for a vote, a real-time duel arena, an eight-stage gym with a boss for each, a trading post, a village hub. Sound too — background music down to 24 different special-move effects.
- A card album — every captured card in one place
- Head-to-head voting — pick the funnier of two, votes accumulate into a rank
- A duel arena — real-time battles with your cards
- An 8-stage gym — beat each boss in order
- A trading post — swap cards with other players
- A recovery code — get cards back on a new phone with no account
- Sound — music, effects, and 24 special-move sounds, all synthesized in code
"Every screen just sits there"
Everything was built. Then the owner actually used it.
There's no flow to this game. Every screen you go into just sits there. It's not fun, and it feels sloppy.
The screens got opened again and the numbers got counted. Of 171 cards in the album, only 25 (15%) had a settled rank. 143 (85%) were still pending — and 138 of those (82%) needed just two more votes to settle. None of that showed up unless you clicked into a card one at a time.
| What got checked | Number |
|---|---|
| Cards in the album | 171 |
| Cards with a settled rank | 25 (15%) |
| Cards still pending | 143 (85%) |
| Cards "two votes away" | 138 (82%) |
The center of the fun got rewritten four times
The owner summed it up:
As a game it's just rock-paper-scissors. It's not really a game, not really nickname-collecting, not really a generator either.
What the owner said
I want to show off the funny nicknames I've seen, and let other people come pick real in-game nicknames from what's here. Just collecting gives you nothing to do, so there needs to be a game too
So here is what I did
- Plan 1 — keep only a "nickname World Cup" bracket, hide the rest
- Pushback: "How does a World Cup by itself make this fun?" — a fair point. No suspense about the outcome, nothing of mine at stake
- Plan 2 — a "nickname contest": a theme is posted, entries come in, the World Cup judges them, guess the winner
- Plan 3 — a card game scored by nickname rank, proposed by the owner. Ran it through simulation first to check fairness — and it failed
- Plan 4 — a stock-market style system where card prices rise and fall, also from the owner. Checking the law and real precedents turned up several warning signs
- On 9/16, the direction landed back on the original "nickname World Cup", with pack-opening added as the reward layer
What the owner didkept asking "but is this actually fun" at every plan, which pushed the next rewrite
The card-game plan got filtered out by numbers
When "a card game scored by nickname rank" came up, it was not judged by feel — a Python script ran hundreds to thousands of fake matches first. The results were bad.
| What was tried | Result |
|---|---|
| Compare scores only (all 3 cards used) | A brand-new player's win rate against a veteran: 0% |
| 5 cards, best of 3 | New-player win rate still near 0% |
| 3-card deck capped at 150 total, 1 point per round | No invincible deck anymore, but a new player with 3 weak cards still only got 18% |
| Same rule, but 8 weak cards to build from | New-player win rate rose to 36% — the fairest version found |
The stock-market plan hit the law first
Next came an idea where whoever finds a nickname first prices its card, and other players trade it, letting the price rise and fall. "Spot it early, watch it take off" was genuinely fun as a concept. Checking it turned up several problems.
- Game-industry law restricts running a business that converts in-game currency back into real money
- Small markets like this have real precedents of a few players pushing prices up together, then pulling out
- Price-as-power repeats the exact fairness problem the simulation already found — whoever starts earliest wins
This runs into the law as written. Can't build it this way.
The more fun an idea looks, the more the law needs checking first
A safer version — fake coins only, no real money — was floated too, but it lost the part that made the idea fun in the first place. This plan is on hold.
What actually got decided — the nickname World Cup
On 9/16 the owner locked the direction. The app's center is "Nickdex: the Nickname World Cup." Picking the funnier of two cards is the game itself, and winning earns a card pack to open.
One line got drawn into this plan: however fancy the cards get, the nickname's own text has to stay the biggest thing on the card. That is a direct fix for the very first problem — a screen where the pixel character was big and the nickname was small.
Every sound is synthesized in code
Music, effects, and 24 different special-move sounds — none of it is an audio file. Code computes each one on the spot. Reference tracks were used for inspiration, never copied in.
Lifting the backing track directly is a no.
The backing track is still part of that song's copyright
Only copyright-free information like tempo and key got reused; the melodies were written fresh. With zero audio files, the app's size stays the same, and each sound wobbles slightly in pitch so repetition wears less.
The day signups got blocked by mistake
To stop bots from mass-creating accounts to inflate votes and pack odds, a math-puzzle check got added before signup. The catch: the moment it went live, anyone on an older app version could no longer create a new account at all.
What is left
The village, duels, gym, and trading post are not being deleted — they are getting hidden behind the main screen for now. The card-rarity presentation and letting players customize (and buy) card decorations are both agreed on in principle, but the detailed design is still waiting on a decision.
After this many rewrites, no promise that this is the final one. What changed is the order of operations — numbers checked and law checked before anything gets built this time. The next episode is probably the one where the design finally holds and a real screen shows up.
