The idea survived. The licence did not.
I pitched Poketopia as a licensed concept: a physical capture ball, a companion app, one loop running across both. The pitch was not approved. Which left an uncomfortable question worth answering honestly.
If the licence is gone, how much of this was ever mine?
More than I expected. The capture loop was mine. The evolution economy was mine. The sync between a device in your hand and a dex in your pocket, the decision about what the ball should know and what the phone should know, the rule that a miss must explain itself: all mine. Only the costume was borrowed.
So I took the costume off. Every borrowed noun got replaced, not softened. That meant writing a cast from scratch, building a type system, renaming the vocabulary down to the nav labels, and drawing a mark that owed nothing to anyone.
- Licensed creatures Buddies A word that works in copy, UI and voice
- Licensed capture device Capture Ball Same physics, no trade dress
- Licensed index Dex Short enough for a five item nav bar
- A borrowed cast 15 buddies, written by me Name, type, four stats, evolution, one line of lore
- A borrowed wordmark An original mark A faceted orb with an energy core
- A borrowed type chart 11 types, my own hues One fixed colour follows a buddy everywhere
Bridging physical play and digital mastery
Poketopia was never an app with a gadget bolted onto it. It is one loop running across two devices: the ball owns the moment of the throw, the phone owns everything you do with what you caught.
The problem I framed the whole pitch around was the gap between those two halves. The physical action happens in your hands, outdoors, with people watching. The digital reward happens later, alone, on a screen. Most toy to app products lose the player in that gap, because the handoff is a spinner and a list.
A hardware to software state machine gives immediate sensory feedback through the capture cycle: haptic vibration paired with colour coded light cues, so the ball answers before the screen does.
A grid Dex and a separate stone inventory track progress, with UI states that adapt to whether you hold only buddies, only stones, or a ready to evolve pair.
The app handles the matching of caught buddies against discovered stones, and pays a completed set or region off with a cinematic reward rather than a toast.
Closing that gap became the brief. The design holds immersion by reducing how often you need to check a screen during physical play, while still giving you a clear, high fidelity roadmap for collection and evolution when you do look down.
Ten steps, two worlds, one seam
Before a single screen, I mapped the loop as two lanes: what happens in your hand, and what happens on your phone. The whole design problem lives in the seam between them.
Physical capture
- 01 Wake the ball Slow cyan breathe
- 02 Scan for signal Cyan sweep, soft tick
- 03 Signal locked Amber hold, one tap
- 04 Throw Amber streak
- 05 Outcome Green double tap, or red buzz
Digital mastery
- 06 Sync Catch history, hit ratio
- 07 Dex entry opens Type colour, stats, lore
- 08 Stone check Inventory matched, silently
- 09 Ready to evolve Indigo badge on the tile
- 10 Evolve Full screen sequence
One rule came out of this map and governed everything after it: every physical action gets an answer you can feel without looking. The screen is where you go to understand what you caught. It is not where you go to find out whether you hit.
Rebuilding it as live markup rather than a flat export did more than tidy it up. It forced me to write down the output of every single step, and that column is exactly where the light and haptic language came from.
Twelve panels, one uninterrupted loop
The first pass was twelve pencil panels, drawn to answer one question: can a player get from switching the ball on to evolving a buddy without ever being told what to do next?
Two decisions came out of this pass and survived every rebuild since.
- The escape screen gets as much room as the catch screen. It reports a hit ratio and a reason, because a miss you understand is a miss you will take another run at.
- The inventory is a destination, not a drawer. Putting stones and buddies on the same screen is what later turned matching from a chore into the loop's best moment.
Every throw needs an answer
The ball is a five state machine and nothing more. It waits, it listens, it arms, it registers an impact, it reports an outcome. Everything clever happens on the phone, which keeps the hardware cheap and the loop fast.
- Idle Breathing, waiting to be picked up
- Listening Sweeping for a nearby buddy signal
- Armed Signal locked, throw window open
- Impact Accelerometer registers the hit
- Result Caught, or escaped with a reason
Escaped is a real state, not an error. It gets its own light, its own haptic, its own screen, and a reason: too fast, low accuracy, resisted capture. A miss that explains itself is a miss players accept, and it is the difference between a game that feels unfair and a game that feels hard.
The ball owns five states, one accelerometer reading and two output channels. The phone owns the cast, the economy, the inventory logic and every decision that needs memory. If the phone is out of range, the ball still works. It just cannot tell you what you caught yet.
Every state got a screen, including the ones nobody wants
A collection loop fails at its edges, not its middle. Catching something is easy to design. What breaks a game is the first time a player has a stone and no buddy, or a buddy and no stone, or taps evolve on something that has already evolved.
So I drew the branches out in full, screen by screen, before committing to any of it. Each row below is one strand of the logic: onboarding and capture, then collection and inventory, then the evolution quest with a separate frame for every combination the player can arrive in.
This is the sheet the shipped prototype was built from, and it is why the Dex badges a count instead of making you go and check. The inventory combinations were drawn as separate frames here first, which made it obvious that most of them are the app telling you to go back outside, and only one of them is a button.
Five rules came out of the hi-fi pass and became the spec:
Conditional logic trips the ready to evolve state automatically, off real time inventory matching. The player never asks for it.
On screen animation is mapped to the ball's haptic engine so the two land together instead of one chasing the other.
The inventory works as a visual database, bridging discovered stones and the specific buddies they unlock.
Overlays carry you from a technical management screen into a reward sequence that celebrates a completed set.
Glass and semi transparency keep data legible underneath high intensity energy effects, rather than competing with them.
Fifteen buddies, invented from scratch
A collection game is only as good as the things you collect. Each buddy got a name, a type, four base stats, an evolution and exactly one line of lore. The lore line does the heavy lifting: it is the only place a creature gets to have a personality.
Generates static electricity while running. It loves stormy weather.
The bulb on its back absorbs sunlight to convert into pure energy.
Its tail flame indicates its mood. If it burns blue, it is ready to fight.
Hides in its shell when threatened, shooting high pressure water jets.
Its genetic code is unstable, allowing it to adapt to any environment.
Possesses six tails that grow hotter as it evolves. Very intelligent.
Sings a soothing melody that puts enemies to sleep instantly.
Loyal and brave. It will bark fiercely to protect its trainer.
Came from the moon on a shooting star. It glows in the dark.
Sleeps 18 hours a day. It uses telepathy even while dreaming.
Weak and pathetic, but it has the potential to become a dragon.
Looks like a plain rock. If you trip on it, it will get angry.
Made of gas. It can slip through any wall or barrier easily.
Sheds its skin constantly as it grows. Found near waterfalls.
Its scythes are sharp enough to cut through thick logs.
Nine buddies need a specific stone to evolve, five evolve on levels alone, and one is already its final form. That mix is deliberate. The free evolutions keep the first hour rewarding, the stone gated ones turn the inventory into a puzzle rather than a list, and the buddy that never evolves quietly teaches players that not every tile has a next step.
The app does the remembering
Poketopia never asks you to recall which stone unlocks which buddy. The inventory is relational: the moment you hold both halves of a pair, the buddy lights up and the Dex badges the count.
Three inventory states drive the entire evolution surface, and the UI adapts to whichever one you are in:
The Dex stays quiet and points you outward. The next action is to go find a stone, so that is the only thing offered.
Stones show what they would unlock, greyed. The inventory becomes a wishlist instead of dead weight.
An indigo badge, a pulse on the tile, and a single button. Nothing to look up, nothing to match, nothing to remember.
This was the change that made the biggest difference to how the app feels. In the first version the player did the matching, and the inventory was admin. Once the system did the matching, the same screen became the part people wanted to open.
Interactive prototype
Play Poketopia
Tap the capture button and go find yourself a buddy
Sixteen screens, one grammar
Dark canvas, one accent per meaning, glow instead of borders. The palette does the explaining so the copy does not have to.
-
01 Command centre Level ring, active quests, what your friends just caught, and every buddy waiting on a stone. -
02 Listening The radar screen while the ball sweeps. No buttons, because your hands are busy. -
03 Armed The power meter. The only moment the app asks for your full attention. -
04 The verdict Caught, or escaped with a reason. Never a silent failure. -
05 The Dex Every buddy in one grid, tinted by type, badged when it is ready to evolve. -
06 Buddy detail Lore first, stats second. You should like it before you optimise it. -
07 Evolution The one place the app takes the whole screen, and earns it. -
08 Proof of play Catch rate over time, so a bad streak reads as a streak and not as a bug.
Neon on black, with rules
Surfaces
The whole app runs on four near blacks. As isolated swatches they look like four identical black squares, because from Night to Track is only 30 points of brightness out of 255. So here they are in place instead, doing their actual jobs. Layers separate through glow, blur and a hairline border, never by getting lighter, which leaves the accent colours as the only bright thing on screen.
- 1 Night
#09090BThe screen itself. Every other surface sits on top of this one. - 2 Panel
#18181BA card lifted off the canvas: quest tiles, buddy cards, bottom sheets. - 3 Track
#27272AThe empty half of a progress or stat bar, waiting to be filled in. - 4 Deep
#0B1220The full bleed capture scene. Cooler and bluer than Night, never lighter.
Signal colours
Each one is a meaning, not a decoration. Every accent ships with a matching soft glow at roughly 30% so the state reads from the corner of your eye.
#22D3EE Active state, glow #06B6D4 Primary action #4F46E5 Evolution #FACC15 Armed, throw #22C55E Caught, healed #EF4444 Escaped, battle Type palette
Eleven buddy types, each with a fixed hue that follows the creature everywhere: dex tile, detail header, stat bars, battle arena.
Type & form
Poketopia
Its tail flame indicates its mood.
Form language
A system, not a skin
Poketopia now runs end to end as a working prototype with none of the original licence attached to it. The capture loop, the cast, the economy and the vocabulary are all mine, and the thing that survived the rebuild was the part that was always the actual design work.
What I owned
- Mapped the ten step loop across the physical and digital halves, and defined the sync between them
- Specified the ball as a five state machine with paired light and haptic outputs
- Wrote the full cast: fifteen buddies with names, types, stats, evolutions and lore
- Designed the evolution economy, including the relational inventory that removes the matching work
- Built the dark mode design system and the sixteen screen interactive prototype
Key takeaways
- Constraints clarify. Losing the licence forced me to name what the design actually was. It turned out to be a system, and systems travel.
- Feedback beats fidelity. A two tap haptic tells a player more, faster, than an animation they were never looking at.
- Let the system do the remembering. Moving the stone matching from the player to the app turned the dullest screen into the most opened one.
Tools & deliverables: Figma · Figma Make · React · Motion · journey map · state machine spec · cast and economy bible · dark mode design system · interactive prototype