What do you get when you want to cross your typical social trivia game with Miss Cleo's tarot card hotline? You get FRIENDUEL, where you can battle friends for the future! With FRIENDUEL, we set out to create the next addicitive super casual game to play amongst friends. Pick up FRIENDUEL to make that last minute prediction on how many points Steph Curry will put up tongiht, or maybe place your bet on who comes out on top after the 2nd Presidential Debate! See if you can dominate the leaderboards and prove to your friends that you're the reincarnation of Nastradamus.

One of the major design challenges we faced early on was determining if FRIENDUEL was going to be an "app" or a "game". Luckily for our team, I have deep experience in casual games and I leveraged that experience to help our team build something of a hybrid. :) We used lightweight game mechanics like simple level progressiion, leaderboards, and we even planned to grant some flavorful player titles and achievements to players who reached high prediction accuracy across a certain category. I suggested we throw in the ability to taunt your friends on their picks with animated gifs utilizing the GIFY api, and rewarding level up animations and other cool feedback animations helped to make the product feel fun while encouraging friendly competition and compulsive behavior. Creating a product from scratch has a unique set of challenges, especially when the product's user experience is intended to heavily rely on frequent social interactions. We came up with multiple solutions to help solve the empty room problems, such as funny GIFY inspired invite flows to clever push notifications that allowed the user to send trolling gifs until they accepted an invitation to play.