shuffl

Play classic card games right from your phone!

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Inspiration

Our inspiration for this app came from many late night card game sessions with our friends! We often played together until the early hours of the morning and had lots of fun. But then, as we got older, started going to university and moved to different cities or even countries, we lost this way of connecting with each other.

That's why we created shuffl: to bring back this way of connecting and playing together.

What it does

Shuffl is an app that allows you to play many different classic card games from all over the world with your friends. You can create a private table and invite your friends with a code.

For people who want to try out or learn new games, we also added a bot system. There are 3 stages of bots: Easy, Medium and Hard. Each stage plays differently and has a different level of difficulty. Within each stage there are different bots that all have their own "personality" and play style. That makes the games even more fun and interesting.

How it makes money

The core of shuffl is free: you can play all games with up to 3 players and against the bots. We purposfully made all games free for now, as we want people from all over the world to try out their local games! With shuffl Pro you can play with more than 3 players and unlock custom deck designs. We chose this because most classic card games are the most fun with 4 or more people, so Pro is there for the real game nights with the whole friend group, while everyone can still try the full game for free.

How we built it

We built shuffl natively in Swift. For the backend and matchmaking we use Supabase. We also thought about using iCloud, but unfortunately it was not feasible for a live multiplayer game. For the payment logic we integrated RevenueCat.

The assets like the cards were designed and partly also created in Figma.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge of shuffl was to get the animations and the feel of the game right. We thought it was essential that playing cards actually feels fun and satisfying. We feel like for a game like this it is very important, because when you don't like the main game mechanic, games quickly feel boring and repetitive.

For that to work we had to really focus on dialing in the animation speed, the haptic feedback and the sounds. It was quite difficult to find the right balance and still make it feel fun and dynamic.

The second challenge was to make the design of the app feel very clean and easy to understand, without any bloat or clutter. Most apps in this space feel a bit dated and we really wanted to avoid that, especially because playing cards is such a classic and timeless activity. We tried to give it a modern and fresh touch.

A third challenge was localizing the game names and rules. Classic card games are played differently all over the world, so we had to create a sheet with custom rules for each game. We tried to make it as easy as possible for people to understand the rules and change them, so they can play the games the way they are used to. We tried to offer many options for each game, but user feedback is also essential here if an option is missing that people would like to see.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we managed to turn something as "old" and "classic" as card games into a fun, unique and playful app, where the animations and the gameplay feel fun and satisfying.

What we learned

We learned that the small details like animation timing, haptics and sounds make a huge difference in how fun a game feels. It is important to really try out your app and play games yourself to really get a feeling of what needs to change.

What's next for shuffl

Next we want to add more and more games to shuffl, so even more people can enjoy it, and also add more card designs!

We also want to keep improving the custom rules for each game based on user feedback, so everyone can play the games exactly the way they know them from home.

Another big goal is to make playing together with friends even easier and more fun, so that shuffl becomes the place where friend groups meet up for their game nights, no matter where they live.

We plan on making fixed tables for groups that play often, so they can have stats over a longer period of time. And a update is on the way to enable the ability to join via qr code and links :)

And of course we want to keep polishing the animations and the feel of the game, because that is what makes shuffl special for us.

We're entering shuffl for the Best Game Award and the RevenueCat Design Award.

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