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Arrit Gashi
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Shipped2026Game · Mobile app

Pishpirik

A classic card game for phones: play a friend, team up two against two, or take on ten AI opponents.

App StoreGoogle Playpishpirik.com
Cover art: the Pishpirik title in gold, the line The classic card game, rebuilt, and the eagle mascot beside a phone showing the game's Home screen with the Play button.
Cover art composed from the game's brand art and its real Home screen.
accounts moved to the new economy on launch night
17,666
automated tests across server, rules and functions
1,600+
commits in under two weeks
695

The problem

Pishpirik was built for iPhone and Android by the studio Stepico: 605 commits by five developers between January 2025 and September 2026. When I took over the code, a request for ten small changes came back at around ten thousand dollars, which is fair for a game studio, and made me ask whether I could rebuild the game myself. The inherited version also trusted the phone with everything: the coins were saved by the app, the database rules let a phone write any player's profile, and every match ran on a hosted multiplayer service billed by concurrent players.

What I built

Every screen was redesigned and rebuilt in Unity: home, game mode, shop, locker, friends, the leaderboard, the table for one against one and for two against two, the end screen and a 40-tier seasonal pass. Around the game itself came a ten-level AI ladder up to the King, a skill rating from Rookie to Grandmaster, and 3D effects modelled in Blender for the moment a player makes a Pishpirik.

Multiplayer moved off the hosted service onto a game server of my own, written in .NET and compiling the game's own C# rules, so the server and the phones can never disagree about a move. The server deals the cards, settles every match and owns every coin; Apple and Google confirm that each phone runs the genuine app before it can play; every purchase is verified with the store. A load test put 2,500 simulated players on one small server, using a fifth of one CPU core.

Around it: database rules locked down, a word filter and photo moderation, report and block, invite notifications, an admin panel, and a new website in eight languages with a playable demo against the AI. All of it was built with Claude Code and the Unity command-line tools — 695 commits in under two weeks.

The hard part

Moving a live economy to the server in one night

17,666 accounts held coins that their phones had saved, under rules that let a phone write anything. From launch the server had to own every coin, without stranding a player halfway: an old app still running, a purchase in flight, a match in progress. The new app reads one launch switch — off, paused, live — so the release could reach the stores days ahead and change nothing until the switch moved.

The night itself was a sequence where every step can be undone: pause the game, deploy rules that refuse the phone's writes, export the database, dry-run the coin reset, apply it with a marker on each account and a log of every value it replaced, export again, apply the fresh start, open the server to two test phones for one real match, then go live. The maintenance window took under an hour; no account was skipped or failed.

Hours later, the first real two-against-two match showed a table whose player panels the app never switched on. The server cannot change an app, so it refused four-player rooms within the hour; the fixed update was built the same night, and a version check on the server reopens two-against-two only for phones that carry the fix.

Outcome

  • Pishpirik 1.2 live on the App Store and Google Play since October 14, 2026; the 1.2.1 fix went to store review the next day.
  • About 20,000 downloads so far, and counting.
  • Every match is settled on the server, so coins can no longer be edited on the phone.
  • One small server replaced a multiplayer service billed by concurrent players.

Screens

  • The Home screen: the eagle on a couch holding cards, the coin balance, the Pishpirik Pass bar, Free coins, Invites, Quests and vs AI buttons, and a large Play button above the tab bar.

    Home: the Pass, free coins, invites, quests and the AI ladder around one Play button.

  • The Game Mode screen: Quick match, Friends, vs AI and Practice cards, the 1 vs 1 or 2 vs 2 format, the match length, and three table sizes with the larger ones locked.

    Game mode: one against one or two against two, against people or the AI, at tables that open as you play.

  • A match in progress: a giant wooden hammer, modelled in 3D, coming down on the pile in the middle of the table, with the opponent's photo and the score at the top.

    Hammer Slam: one of the 3D effects modelled in Blender for the moment a player makes a Pishpirik.

  • The end screen: a large WIN banner, Promoted to Silver, the two players' photos and ratings, the points round by round, the rewards, and a Rematch button.

    The end of a match, settled by the server: points per round, rating, rewards and a rematch.

  • The Leaderboard: the world top three on a podium, then the ranked list with each player's rating, and the player's own place highlighted.

    The leaderboard, ordered by the Pishpirik Rating.

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