This was another internal project developed out of an idea from a family member. Originally framed as a decal company for hunters (stickers for the back window of your pickup, for example), I developed the initial designs but then expanded on the idea—
I figured it could actually exist as a social media platform, where users could earn digital badges rather than physical decals.
As a plus, this made it so that written “stories” became much more central to the overall premise.
The mission — Design and build a social media platform for outdoor sportsmen (hunting & fishing).
The Inspiration
Storytelling sits at the heart of GameTiks. A family member kept journals and photos from years of hunts, a date, a location, a few lines about the day. That habit became the model: the story of the hunt mattered more than the catch itself. Eventually, keeping the nostalgia of hunting alive became the whole pitch.
Gamified Systems
GameTiks rewards activity through a configurable points engine that accounts for species, weight, and method of take, balancing difficulty and scale so the scoring stays meaningful across very different kinds of outings.
Leaderboard performance — Rank calculations run on a fixed schedule rather than at click time, serving pre-baked standings from indexed columns instead of live table scans. Each user carries a stored rank value so the leaderboard never re-sorts the full user table on request. Badges are earned automatically from a player's activity history, evaluated on each upload against a set of configurable criteria, with a batch reconciliation job available when scoring rules change.
Geolocation
Every entry in GameTiks is pinned to the exact coordinates where it happened, turning a personal logbook into an interactive map of community activity. Privacy controls sit independently of the entry itself, so a user can share their story publicly while keeping the precise location visible only to contacts or themselves.
Geolocation performance — Viewport-bounded queries return only pins within the current map view, capped at 50 results per request. At lower zoom levels, individual pins are replaced by cluster markers, count indicators grouping nearby activity, precomputed offline across a global grid and served in full on load. Individual pins load incrementally on map idle, not on every pixel of movement.
The Icon System
The icon system needed to work at small sizes without losing clarity. Each silhouette was reduced to its simplest possible form, as few lines and curves as the shape would allow, while staying instantly recognisable. For every game type, the challenge was choosing a single pose or angle that did two things at once: read clearly as that specific species, and carry the same visual weight as every other icon in the set.
Light icons on dark
Scalable by Design
These icons needed to scale naturally across any viewport. Rather than designing one fixed size and shrinking it down, every silhouette was checked at small sizes throughout the design process. The result is a single icon system that holds up wherever it appears, in the harvest log, the tally system, or the brag card itself.
Icon rendering — Each silhouette is exported as an SVG, scaling losslessly at any viewport size without rasterisation artifacts. Shapes are pure fills, with no stroke or outline, keeping the forms clean at any size.
The Badge System
These badges needed to read clearly at small scale, just like the icon set, while feeling a step more substantial. The goal was flat, restrained shapes rather than the glossy, over-rendered look common in mobile game UI, with just enough dimensionality from a two-shade colour system.
Badge system — Badges evaluate automatically against a configurable criteria set each time a harvest is published, with no manual award step. New badge types can be introduced without changes to application logic. A batch reconciliation job re-evaluates all users when criteria are updated, keeping historical accounts accurate after rule changes.
Standard badges
Specialty badges
*Maine Technology Institute
The outcome — $25,000 matched grant awarded*. 4,000+ harvests logged by 1,400 users.