Play Whot

Why Whot

Whot is the card game a lot of Nigerians grew up with: match the shape or the number on the pile, survive the action cards, and call out before your last card. Most digital versions I tried got the rules roughly right and the experience wrong, with cluttered menus, slow tables and art that felt borrowed from somewhere else.

I wanted a version that felt like it belonged to the game: quick to start, clear on a small screen, and still responsive on the kind of mid-range or older phone a lot of players actually use.

What I’m working on

The interesting work turned out to be everything around the rules:

• Making the menus understandable. The game grew a store, profiles, lessons, friend rooms and matchmaking, and each had picked up its own layout. I redesigned them around one shared frame with the same header, back control and choice controls everywhere, and removed the duplicates.
• Keeping it responsive on less powerful devices. The table is a 2.5D scene, so textures are compressed for the GPU and the build fails if the download grows past a set budget.
• Making multiplayer survive real networks. Refreshing during a match takes you back to it, a phone that silently drops off is noticed within 45 seconds, and slower players can join a free table that has already started instead of holding everyone up.
• Making the artwork part of the game. Characters, tables and sound are chosen to feel Nigerian and consistent, not like a generic card-game template.

How one move travels

The same rules engine runs everywhere, so a move is judged the same way whether you’re playing the computer on your phone or a friend in another city. Press the button to follow one card through the system.

What changed after testing

The game has been rebuilt more than once. An early Flutter version and a React version using an off-the-shelf multiplayer server are both archived now. The current version keeps what worked from each and moves the rules into one shared engine.

Before releases I check more than whether it builds. For the menu redesign that meant running the regression suite, then checking every menu entry point at four screen sizes in both light and dark themes for layout drift, overflow and keyboard focus. Feedback from players keeps reshaping the home screen. The current version is one main Play button and four tables, so getting into a game takes as few taps as possible.

How it’s built

I build Play Whot with AI coding tools doing a lot of the implementation. My job is the product and the judgement: deciding what the game should feel like, writing the brief, reviewing and testing what comes back, catching what’s wrong, and deciding what ships. I’m not claiming to have hand-written every line, but I am responsible for every decision.

Still in development

• Matchmaking and multiplayer haven’t yet been tested at scale across regions.
• The native mobile wrapper is still in progress.
• The store and in-game economy are still being tuned.