Chips of Fury

I spent the past few months re-doing the multiplayer networking code for the app, and finally it looks like it is more stable than before. I managed to ship a bunch of features and the app looks really feature complete for hosting private poker games!

If there are any poker players hanging around in these halls, please check out chips of fury. I would love to hear feedback / critique.

I think my design skills are improving. I'll leave the judgement to you guys though. This was long due, I had barely kept the landing page updated as Chips of Fury evolved.

Also, props to Webflow for being such a well designed product. It has made the job of designing a responsive website so much easier.

PS. I'm very proud of the CSS poker table I made in my header 😁

Finally the plan is starting to come together. Started with adding Omaha and Omaha 5 in addition to Texas Hold'em which was already supported. But most importantly, players will have the ability to switch between variations on any hand - dealer's choice style of play is supported :)

This version is also a major rewrite on the backend. So overall, the gameplay is starting to become sleek and bug free. It has been a lot of learning, especially on handling multiplayer concurrency issues from a technical point of view.

The good news is that with this new architecture, I'll be able to add more variations quicker. Goal is to add a few every month!

From being a virtual poker app, Chips of Fury is now a full fledged Poker app to host a private game. The damned Corona virus made me do it. Some silver lining after all. I had always planned to add cards to the app, but this was the push I needed 🤷

Last week I launched a complete redesign of the app. This included UX improvements that make the gameplay simpler and more informative. It is also the first version with a professionally designed UI. I took help from a contractor to design two screens, and using that theme designed the rest of them myself.

I really wanted to see if a better looking design would impact conversions, but so far it seems it hasn't created much of a difference. I'll wait for another few weeks to pass judgment though as people might take time to make a purchase decision.

I launched in-app purchases for Chips of Fury on October 4th. Just crossed 500$ in revenue yesterday :)

This has been a soft launch to test the waters on pricing and also get some user feedback on the gameplay itself. The pricing is simple - 2$ one time for a single game in "Poker Mode" or 15$ for an unlimited games license. I don't feel I've built enough value to be able to charge a recurring subscription fee yet.

I am working on a slick redesign of the app to make it look like it is worth paying for :)

PS. If someone here plays poker and wants to do a beta test with the new UI, please let me know.

After seeing traction, I got a lot of feedback on what users wanted out of the app. I also realised that most people were using the app to play Poker, and not any other betting game. So I figured making a Paid version that supports Poker game play more effectively could be a good way to build some business income out of Chips of Fury.

This took much longer to develop than I had hoped. I was doing it part time and under-estimated the effort it would take to build a good multiplayer experience.

Finally launched it after a good 10 months of development!

After launch I mostly didn't think much about it, except pushing my friends to try Chips of Fury by hosting a few poker game parties. Most of my friends still complained about how they miss the "feel" of chips, but at-least agreed that the app was indeed useful in many scenarios.

The good thing about Chips of Fury was that there was some built in social aspects to it. So it slowly started spreading by word of mouth.

After the Christmas of 2018, and new years', Chips of Fury saw its first spike in traffic. Almost 500 games were played on the vacation days and that made me think about it more seriously.

For a few months I had been thinking about making a fun app to replace poker chips. It was born more out of a need as many times we did not have a poker chip set to play with. I wanted the app to resemble physical chips and wanted to make the user experience dead simple with no bells and whistles.

Finally I launched the MVP for Chips of Fury, where players could play poker (or any other betting game that required chips). The game had no business logic whatsoever, but it worked well enough to play!