Case study 03 · Casual games
Wamd ومض
Eight games. One world worth coming back to.
An Arabic-first collection of casual games, from block puzzles to a penalty-kick challenge, held together by one fantasy world, one journey and one economy, built in Flutter for Android, iOS and the web.
- Role
- Founder · product designer · art director
- Platforms
- Android · iOS · iPadOS · web
- Technology
- Flutter · Firebase
- Status
- Live on the App Store, Google Play and the web
The opportunity
Arabic players deserve games made in Arabic, not translated into it.
Casual puzzle games are among the most played apps in the region, yet most are built in English and localised afterwards. Word games rarely work in Arabic, trivia rarely reflects the culture, and layouts often break when mirrored.
A single casual game also has a narrow life: one mechanic, played until it is solved or boring. Variety usually means installing another app and starting from zero.
Existing alternatives
Global single-mechanic hits
Polished and deep, but one game each, and rarely designed for Arabic words or culture.
Mini-game bundles
Variety without coherence: each game looks and behaves differently, and progress in one means nothing in the others.
Classic Arabic word games
Familiar and loved, but usually played on paper or in basic apps without progression or social play.
The design opportunity
Build a coherent entertainment product: many interaction models, one world, one navigation model, one reward system and one place to play with friends, designed in Arabic from the first screen.
My ownership
Game design, art direction and live operations.
Wamd is my own product. I designed the games' rules and progression, directed the world and characters, defined the economy, and ran releases and marketing. Code was implemented by AI coding agents from my specifications, and illustrations were produced with AI image-generation tools from reference boards I assembled and art-directed. Every screen, button and board is built in Flutter, not baked into images.
What I led
- The portfolio of games, their rules, difficulty curves and level structure
- The Wamd Journey, daily challenge, leaderboards and friend matches
- World-building, character roles, the purple-and-gold identity and UI system
- The economy: coins, helpers, revives, rewards, ads and purchases
- Playtesting on devices, store listings and App Review responses
- Measurement plan and marketing creative
What AI-assisted tools contributed
- Implemented the screens and games from my specifications
- Generated environment art, characters and spot-the-difference scenes from my references
- Helped produce and check level content at scale
What stayed under my direction
- Selecting, correcting and rejecting generated art so the world stays consistent
- Fairness rules for rewards, progress and competition
- Every difficulty, reward and price value players actually see
- Release decisions, including when not to ship
- Flutter & Dart
- Firebase
- Claude Code
- Codex
- AI image-generation tools
- Android emulators & iOS simulators
Iteration
From a screen of games to a world.
The first build listed three games on a white screen. It worked, but nothing connected one game to the next. Over six weeks the product became a place: first a fantasy journey that strings the games together, then a lighter, calmer home that lets the world appear where it matters.
5 Sep 2026
A list of games
Three games, a daily challenge card and a white interface. Functional, with no reason to move from one game to another.
14 Sep 2026
A world to travel
The Wamd Journey turns the games into stages on a map of floating islands, with stars, chests and a world gate.
Oct 2026 · v1.6.0
A home that breathes
An ivory home with deep purple cards: the journey and friend matches lead, and the fantasy art is used as a reward, not wallpaper.
Design decisions
Consistency where it helps, character where it counts.
Eight games means eight interaction models. The design system had to make them feel like one product without flattening what makes each fun.
One frame around every game
- Context
- Block, Path, Striker and Spot the Difference share almost nothing in how they are played.
- Decision
- Every game opens the same way: a level brief with the goal, difficulty and expected time, then a board inside a shared frame with the same back, sound and pause controls in the same places. Only the board changes.
A shared level brief: goal, difficulty, time. Make the stars visible before they are lost
- Context
- Journey stages award up to three stars, scored on bonus time and moves: rules a player couldn't see while playing.
- Decision
- An objective bar above every journey board shows the goal, live progress and both bonus conditions. A condition is struck through the moment it is spent, so a player can see the third star is gone and stop rushing.
Failure that stays fair
- Context
- Unlimited retries make stages meaningless; hard walls make players quit.
- Decision
- Two consecutive fails on a stage stop the journey there. The player can pay that world's revive price in coins or restart the world. A pass clears the count, so nobody is charged for a stage they once struggled with.
- Trade-off
- A real cost to failure, framed as a choice rather than a penalty.
Teach mechanics in the moment
- Context
- Path puzzles introduce portals, stars and blocked cells across 100 levels.
- Decision
- Levels open with a short instruction card that explains the mechanics on that board, in plain language, instead of a long tutorial up front.
Path level 40: portals, stars and blocked cells.
The games
Different mechanics, one family.
Art direction & visual design
A fantasy world with a readable interface.
Wamd's world is rich: floating islands, castles, glowing chests and a cast of characters. The interface around it is deliberately simple: ivory surfaces, one deep purple, and gold reserved for rewards and the next action. Rounded Nunito and Tajawal keep the tone friendly in both scripts while staying legible at game speed.
Colour
- Violet
#613AF2Primary brand, game cards and selection - Deep
#211956Journey panels and deep surfaces - Gold
#FFB51BPrimary actions, coins and rewards only - Pearl
#FFFBF7Home and hub canvas - Lilac
#EDE7FFSoft containers and active tabs - Lagoon
#078C86Success and secondary accents
Typography
رحلة ومض
Tajawal · Arabic display and interface
Place it. Blast it!
Nunito · English display and numbers: rounded, quick to read
Principles
Gold means go
Gold is used only for the next action and for rewards, so the eye always finds what to tap.
Art rewards, interface informs
Illustration fills the journey, results and stadiums. Boards and controls stay flat and high-contrast.
Characters have jobs
Each character belongs to a game or a moment: the striker, the wizard guiding the journey, the avatars players choose.
Real differences only
Every spot-the-difference scene was checked so that each difference a player finds is a real, visible one. Fairness is part of the fun.
Characters
A cast players choose from.
Player avatars share one illustration style, so leaderboards and friend matches feel part of the same world.
Motion & feedback
Feedback you can feel.
Clears, combos and power-ups use short bursts of motion and sound so a good move feels good, while the board itself stays still and readable. Motion is reduced where the device asks for it.
From design to production
One codebase, every screen, one experience.
Wamd is built with Flutter, so one design system reaches Android, iOS, tablets and the web at the same time. For a collection of eight games, that meant every visual rule, from the gold call to action to the shared level brief, only had to be designed and verified once.
- Platforms
- Android, iOS and iPadOS, and the web, from one Flutter codebase
- Accounts & progress
- Firebase, so progress, coins and friends follow the player across devices
- Business model
- Free to play, with optional rewarded ads and in-app purchases
The phone design comes first
Tablets and the web get wider layouts with boards beside their panels, but the phone experience, designed and tuned first, never changes by accident.
Fair play is a design decision
Rewards, scores and progress are validated centrally, so leaderboards and friend matches stay fair for every player.
Content at the scale of eight games
Hundreds of levels and scenes were produced with tooling and then reviewed, so variety never came at the cost of quality.
Test on a real device before release
Every release is installed and opened on a real device from the exact store build before it is uploaded.
Launch & real-world validation
Shipped and growing. Retention is the open question.
Wamd is live on the App Store, Google Play and the web. Its engagement systems, the journey, daily challenge, wheel and friend matches, are deliberate hypotheses. I am establishing a retention baseline from the product's own data before claiming any of them work.
- Downloads500+Google Play downloads (Play's public install bracket)Google Play listing · 20 Oct 2026
- Delivery8Games live in one app, each with its own level structureGoogle Play listing and app build 1.6.0 · Oct 2026
Experiments and what they taught me
Journey as the spine
Hypothesis: a sequence of mixed stages gives players a reason to try games they wouldn't pick from the hub. Measured through stage completions and which games players move to next.
Daily challenge and leaderboards
Hypothesis: the same round for everyone each day creates a habit and something to compare. Measured against daily usage.
Helpers for new players
New players now start with three of every helper, to see whether an easier first session changes early drop-off.
Not yet available, and why
- Day-1, day-7 and day-30 retention: baseline being established; not yet published.
- Active users and session length: tracked internally, approximate by design, not yet published.
- Ad and purchase revenue: not published.
- App Store downloads: just launched; to be added from App Store Connect.
Release constraints
What the stores taught me.
Android 1.3.0
A build that couldn't open
A release passed every check on my machine and still failed to open on phones. Since then, no build ships until it has been installed and opened on a real device.
App Review · 1
Screenshots and embedded games
Apple asked for screenshots showing the app in use and clarification that no games are downloaded. Screenshots were replaced with unedited gameplay captures, and the reply documented that all eight games ship inside the binary.
App Review · 2
A word that was a trademark
"Memory" is a registered mark in one market. The game was renamed "Cards" across the app, metadata and screenshots, without touching saved progress. The next build was approved, and Wamd is now live on the App Store.
Challenges & lessons
Scope is the hardest game.
Every game multiplies the work
Eight games mean eight sets of levels, results, store screenshots and review questions. Depth in a few games may matter more than adding a ninth.
Engagement systems need evidence
Wheels, streaks and journeys are easy to build and easy to believe in. Treating them as experiments, with a baseline first, is the only honest way to know.
AI art needs an art director
Image generation made a rich world possible for one person. Keeping it coherent meant rejecting most outputs and fixing details by hand.
Reflection
A world is a system, not a skin.
Wamd shows I can design entertainment as a system: interaction models, progression, economy, art direction and live operations, while staying honest about what the data does and doesn't yet prove.
What I learned
- Coherence comes from shared rules more than shared colours.
- Fairness is a UX decision: players feel it before they can name it.
- Store policies are part of the design brief, especially for games.
What I would investigate next
- Publish the retention baseline and test the journey against it.
- Decide which games deserve more depth and which should be retired.
- Compare how iOS and Android players behave now that both are live.
Designing a product with many moving parts?
I bring structure to complex experiences, so they feel like one product without losing what makes each part special.