A football management game, built on top of NFT trading cards

A trading card collection is only ever worth as much as the game around it. Nifty Football had a finished collectible card set but no game. The cards were illustrated by Manchester artist Stanley Chow. Beautiful artwork with no reason to play. The brief was to build a full football management game on top of them, turning collectibles into players with statistics, unique traits, and a play loop worth coming back to.

The unspoken design problem: collectibles want scarcity, games want parity. Rare cards needed to feel valuable, but every card had to stay viable in a squad or the meta would collapse. I designed a stat system where rarity unlocked traits and ceilings rather than raw power, so every card was useful, but the rare ones were still worth chasing.

I owned UX and UI across the full game: squad management, match flow, training, and the in-game XP economy.

The animations and interactions were mine too: card reveals on squad generation, pack openings, the kickoff-to-result beats during match flow, XP and stat tickers, and the drag-drop formation work on the pitch view.

It was built in close partnership with an external backend team. In-person workshops between our teams and the client shaped the API contracts around what the game UX actually needed, rather than reshaping the UX around what the backend already returned.

Everything was designed in Figma and After Effects, signed off, then built in Vue and Nuxt.