Case study 01 — iOS party game
A Naija party game where the culture is the mechanic.
Join the TestFlight betaAct 01 — The problem
Party games like Taboo and Heads Up work because of shared context — the laughter comes from everyone knowing exactly what you're failing to say. But their decks are culturally generic. For Nigerian players, the words, slang, food, music, and inside jokes that would actually set a room on fire simply aren't in the box.
Wetin Be Dis starts from the opposite end: what if the cultural specificity wasn't flavor on top of the game, but the game itself? Every card assumes the room shares a world — and the gameplay is what happens when you have to explain that world with your hands tied.
Act 02 — The system
The loop
Every design decision serves this loop: shorten the path to it, never interrupt it, make it louder each cycle.
Act 03 — The calls I made
The prompts are written in the voice of the room — Pidgin first, formal English never. 'Wetin be dis? Explain am well.' isn't decoration; it sets the register the whole game is played in. If the game doesn't sound like the people playing it, the chaos doesn't land.
Each card bans exactly the words anyone would reach for first. The design goal is a specific moment: the player opens their mouth, realizes every obvious route is blocked, and has to invent a worse, funnier one. The banned list is the comedy engine.
No accounts, no lobby, no downloads for guests. Pick categories, set the timer, pass the phone. A party game competes with the party itself — every screen between 'open app' and 'first laugh' is a screen where someone starts a different conversation.
The gameplay card uses oversized type and hard contrast because the real play environment is loud, dim, and full of people leaning over shoulders shouting guesses. The interface is designed for the room, not the hand.
Act 04 — The screens
Act 05 — Reflection
Writing the cards is harder than building the app. The SwiftUI work was straightforward; finding prompts that are guessable, bannable, and funny at the same time is a real editorial discipline.
Group testing changes everything. Words I thought were obvious died in the room, and throwaway cards became the ones people quoted afterwards. The deck now gets edited the way stand-up gets edited: in front of people.
Cultural products earn trust through specificity. Every time the game names something precisely — a dish, a lyric, a saying — the room gets louder. Generalizing to 'reach more people' would quietly kill the thing that works.
Where it stands: Available as a TestFlight beta. Currently expanding the category packs, tuning round pacing from group play sessions, and designing the sound layer before an App Store push.