ChaleCheck is an experimental marketing company with a social gaming and events platform, built around near-weekly game nights with around 200 attendees, running recurring events like Tequila and The Bee. I designed the whole app alongside a small team of three, myself and two developers, taking on the majority of the design, the product direction, and a large share of the build.
I built the original version of the app first, then led a full redesign once it was clear the experience wasn't holding together. Before the redesign, the product felt like several disconnected pieces stitched into one: the app, the live game, and the day's activity all worked, but didn't feel like part of the same thing, and it looked rough. The redesign unified all of it around four core tabs: Home, Events, Activity, and Rank. From there, users can browse and book onto a game night, and pay for activities and tickets directly in the app.
The app is built around the live game nights themselves. Users form a group and join in on the night, earning XP as a group by completing games, whether those are live, in-person embarrassing games or digital games inside the app. Group XP shows up live on screen during the event, and carries over to the Rank tab in the app, where groups climb the rankings between events.
I also designed the app's gamification system from the ground up, building the group XP and ranking mechanics into the product itself rather than bolting them on. Separately, I redesigned the landing page so it looked and felt as polished as the app it was introducing people to.
One of the pieces I spent the most time on was a custom live display system, essentially a rendering engine I built for use during the events themselves. It shows real-time information like group XP and live activities such as spelling bee rounds, alongside slides and animated graphics, all linked directly into the app. It became a core part of how ChaleCheck events feel in the room, not just something that lives in people's pockets.
I'm also leading exploration into more experimental games for game nights. One example is a charades game we built ourselves from scratch, where a player holds their phone above their head so only the group behind them can see the prompt on screen, and I designed and built that end to end. It's an area I'm actively pushing on, and one of the most fun parts of working on ChaleCheck.
Reliability under real load was just as important as the experience itself. The app is built to handle hundreds of concurrent users during live game nights, including the real-time online games system used on the night, so the platform holds up when the room is actually full and everyone's on their phone at once. Making it work reliably on low or bad network was just as much a focus: we don't provide internet at the events, so the app has to cope with network congestion from a packed room plus wildly varying connection speeds across players, rather than assuming everyone has a strong, stable signal.
Beyond the product, I designed all branding, marketing, and motion assets for ChaleCheck, and co-developed its social media strategy with a marketing manager formerly at Binance. That work has helped grow ChaleCheck to around 5,200 followers, with a single week reaching around 408,000 impressions and a single month reaching around 6.2 million impressions.