How Vendetta brought fair, skill-based play to a fully on-chain strategy game.

A game genre no one had designed before.

Vendetta is the first fully on-chain, text-based multiplayer strategy game on SUI. There were no existing UX patterns to reference — every flow, interaction, and mechanic had to be figured out from scratch.

The constraints were real. Blockchain scalability limits what data can live on-chain. The community expected fair, skill-based play with no costly NFTs. And the game's story was designed to be player-shaped — evolving in real time based on what the community actually did.

Accessible, engaging, community-driven. By design.

I designed end-to-end flows covering gameplay, onboarding, community features, and engagement mechanics. The whole thing rested on one rule: anyone should be able to play and win based on skill, not how much they spent.

Close collaboration with developers meant a fast-moving cycle: design, test, ship, repeat. A “fail faster” approach kept the product moving and cut development time by 40%.

Learn fast. Test faster.

I started by playing — studying the on-chain games that already existed, talking with early players, and sitting with developers to understand what SUI could and couldn't actually hold. Both sides of the system mattered: what felt fun, and what was feasible to ship.

I reframed the brief. Not “design a game UI.” Design new patterns for a genre that doesn't have patterns yet. Fair, skill-based play with no costly NFTs became the north star, and every decision afterward measured itself against that line. Every idea got pressure-tested against blockchain feasibility before it earned more time on the page.

The design–dev loop stayed deliberately tight. Fidelity matched only what we could actually ship on-chain. After launch, the community kept shaping where the game went next. Coming in as a first-time game designer, that was the win I cared about most.

5,500 players in two weeks. 150K+ transactions on-chain.

Within two weeks of launch, 5,500+ players registered. Daily active users held at 250–350 on-chain players consistently. The game processed 150,000+ on-chain transactions. Discord became a living community — players formed alliances, drove narratives, and shaped the game world in real time.

The commitment to no costly NFTs and skill-based play held up exactly as designed. The personal win: I came into this as a first-time game designer, adapted fast, and shipped something thousands of people chose to play.

What I'd do differently.

I'd invest in onboarding for non-crypto-native playersearlier. The biggest drop-off point in the early weeks wasn't gameplay — it was the moment a player had to connect a wallet for the first time. We patched that fast, but the cleaner version of this product is one where the wallet step is hidden until the player has already chosen to invest.

I'd also document the design rationalemore deliberately. Designing inside a brand-new genre meant every decision rested on a constraint that wasn't obvious to anyone outside the team. The next time I work in greenfield like this, the rationale doc ships with the design, not after.