Rock Paper Shower

Inspiration

It started as a shower thought: everyone on Earth already knows rock-paper-scissors, so why does nobody play it? Because three cards is not a game. Two hundred and forty is.

What it does

Rock Paper Shower turns rock-paper-scissors into a collectible card game. 240 objects across six categories that beat each other in a circle. Same category? Attack meets defense. Build a deck of five, duel live, earn points, crack boosters, and craft your spare rocks into a menhir. Understood in three seconds, strategic in five minutes.

How we built it

React, TypeScript and Tailwind on the front, Supabase for auth, realtime duels and the leaderboard, Vercel to ship it. A retro 3DS-style UI, pixel titles, and a consistent icon set for all 240 cards fed through a small import pipeline. Even the demo video is scripted: Playwright plays the game while a chiptune soundtrack is synthesized from the click log.

Challenges we ran into

Making 240 cards recognizable at thumbnail size. Emoji failed, hand-drawn 16×16 pixel art failed, 64×64 failed, and a unified icon library finally worked. Balancing a circle of six categories so no deck is unbeatable. And the classic 3 a.m. Vercel 404 that turned out to be a stale deployment, not our code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A game you can explain in one sentence and still lose to a smarter player. Boosters that feel like opening real packs, with a tear strip and a secret rare that lands one time in a hundred. A crafting book with 266 recipes. Live duels that actually work.

What we learned

Simple rules scale better than clever ones. Art style is a system, not a series of images. Ship from git, never from a laptop. And a seeded random number generator is the best friend a demo video ever had.

What's next for Rock Paper Shower

Ranked seasons, trading between players, community-submitted objects, and the category everyone keeps asking for: brainrot. It is already drawn. It is waiting.