CorkBrute, a spotting game for my friends

Problem

A lighthearted spotting-game for my friend group, tracking sightings of Cork’s local stereotypical characters.
Team
  • 1 product designer (me)
My role
  • Design & branding
  • Build, with Claude
  • Illustration direction, with ChatGPT
CorkBrute’s character grid, showing spottable characters like Busker, Cowboy, Dolphin and Drunk, each with a point value CorkBrute’s leaderboard, ranking friends by all-time points CorkBrute’s profile screen, customizing the avatar’s eyewear and background color
Characters, leaderboard and profile

Many cities have their own cast of peculiar characters that everybody notices around. Cork has no shortage of them: buskers, oompa loompasGirls with heavy make up and fake tan., people hobbling, drunks, spoon players, young offendersUnderage and up to no good., and plenty more. My friends and I started noticing them and at some point someone said we should be keeping score every time we spotted one. Was I looking for excuses to make another app? Of course I was.

The project started with a list of characters, each with points assigned by rarity of sighting. I then imagined how I’d represent them: I wanted an Arcane-inspired illustration style, painterly but modern, and a bit rough. I tested several image tools, like Recraft, Gemini and ChatGPT, running long prompts to find a cohesive visual language, and settled on ChatGPT for the best results. The style I wanted turned out to be too hard to reproduce, but I defined some common traits for my characters: slight disproportions, larger heads and arms, shorter legs, one dominant theme color, visible brushstroke texture, dynamic poses over static standing, a mischievous expression, and more. These became a long system prompt, adapted for each character, which worked nicely for consistency.

Grid of art style explorations for the same character, moving from a painterly Arcane-style look toward a flatter, more consistent illustration style
Chasing a style that would hold up across a whole cast of characters.
Grid of exploration renders across two different characters, a young hurling fan and an older man with a pint, testing pose and outfit variations
Same system prompt, different characters — testing it held up beyond a single look.
Three finished characters annotated with callouts: disproportional head and hands, one main color per character, and in action poses
The traits behind the system prompt: disproportional heads and hands, one main color per character, dynamic poses.

Since the app itself is simple (a grid of characters, a leaderboard, a history and a profile page), I focused on making it satisfying to use, refining animations and UI details.

Points animating upwards, and player row climbing the leaderboard.
CorkBrute’s character detail screen, annotated to show the background color is thematic per character, points are based on rarity, and bonus points for specific features
Character page.
CorkBrute’s leaderboard, annotated to show laurels for the top 3 places, a highlight on your own row, and hats overflowing the avatar circle
Leaderboard details.
CorkBrute’s leaderboard, annotated to show the install-to-home-screen prompt and a red offline warning banner reading ‘Dead zone. Move.’
PWA install prompt and an offline warning for dead zones.
Three CorkBrute spotting screens side by side, for Heron, Young Offender and Oompa Loompa, each showing a sighting count, flavor description, bonus fields, and a Spotted button
Some characters pages.

The app logo itself is a local reference, riffing on the Shandon Tower from Cork GAA’s crest — in real life topped with a golden salmon, swapped here for a watchful eye Sauron’s tower from Lord of the Rings, topped with the fiery Eye of Sauron .

The app name, "CorkBrute" and its branding are another reference to CorkBeo, a local newspaper.

The Cork GAA crest, topped with the Shandon Tower, next to CorkBrute’s logo, the same tower topped with a watchful eye
Cork iconic landmark, GAA’s crest, and CorkBrute’s own take on it.
CorkBeo’s red masthead logo next to CorkBrute’s own, matching its type and colors
Getting inspired by Cork Beo, the local newspaper.
A row of eye close-up explorations in different colors and expressions, above five variations of the Shandon Tower logo with different eye styles on top
Exploring logo alternatives.

I enjoyed the eye motif so much that I turned it into customizable variations for the player avatars, both to avoid storing uploaded pictures, and to give one more playful touch to the app.

Customizing your avatar.
Grid of avatar customization options, all a single eye on a body, with different hair, hats, a bow tie and a shirt and tie
Exploring avatar variations.

What started as an inside joke turned into a fun way for testing how far I could push AI tools. Claude Code held up far better than I expected, enough that I used it to work with Supabase for the first time. It’s satisfying to see something you made actually get used by your friends, and it’s kinda nice that AI empowers us to build our own stuff, even something as silly as this.

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