I created Duel, a dating app with a twist. The concept is that onboarding and go through profiles, once you match with someone chat is locked and you have to play an online game together before unlocking the chat. The rationale is that you have some sort of fun experience together, and play behaviour is much harder to fake. The games are quite basic: Battleship, Pacman, Connect 4, Guess Who, maze race, draughts (checkers in US), hangman, and a sort of time based scrabble. What I wanted to create is a way for people to show who they are through play. I know people hate dating apps, and so I wanted to create something that's more honest, or at the very least fun.
Does this concept resonate with anyone? Is it stupid? I am married, and I met my wife IRL. When we met Tinder was very new, and people used to be quite embarrassed to tell when they met someone online. But I do have some friends who met their wives through Tinder. So I'm quite removed from the dating world. I've been consuming a lot of content about dating apps, so they seem to have shifted quite a bit from their original modus operandi. And it is invariably true that their business model is in stark contrast to people have successful journeys (i.e. meeting someone and getting off the app). One thing I try to do differently is to allow people to just come and play and meet other people. So people can choose if they like to be matched romantically, or they just want to play, under which circumstance they would be matched randomly with anyone. My long term plan is to have a large library of games, where people can come and play with strangers (a bit like Omegle).
I literally just finished building it and have no users. It's more of a fun project that gotten a life of its own. I create board and card games, so I am very passionate about games, and at heart truly believe that it is a wonderful way to getting to know people through games (how to win, how they lose, how they strategise, are they creative, etc.). I also learned last week while trying to upload the app to Apple’s App Store that Apple almost always rejects dating apps, so that kind of sucks.
I'm also tinkering with the idea of removing the swipe mechanism altogether and replace it with a 2D open world, where people can play single-player games, invite other people to 2-player games, and meet each other through the platform in a not dissimilar way to other dating apps (you see someone on the platform walking around, you can view their profile and decide if you are interested). That way you are in a space that has things to do (play games), but you also can meet other people, and people are their with the intent of meeting someone romantically, but people can't chat to you unless you both matched, so people can't be creeps and send unsolicited messages, while there is still the intentionality of everyone knows they are there to make romantic connections. Still not sure if I want to go that route. I'm quite compelled because it also removes the meat-market-iness and the transactional nature that dating apps have. I think it would also be cool to let game developers to connect their games to the platform, so it becomes an environment that is rich with content and game dev can be there and meet people who play their games.
I know I'm all over the place. I can't help it!