Challenge of the Day

Bringing casual prize-based gameplay to the worlds most competitive games.

Challenge of the Day
Take a look at some of the highlights below!

Getting Started

We wanted to capture attention without too much "marketing" content. You can already see today's Challenges without signing in.

Clear Leaderboards

With so much information to convey, we worked extremely hard to make our leaderboards as clear and appealing as possible.

Create your own

We created an easy flow for players who wanted to create and host their own challenges.
To learn more,
check out the Create a Challenge project.

Challenges by Rainmaker

A new way to play with your friends, and everyone else too.

Summary

Millions of people play the same video games every day. Challenges gives them a new way to compete for fun, or even for cash!

My Role

Lead Designer, Design Manager, Product Manager

Timeline

1 month to create, 3 months of improvements and tuning

Tools

Figma, Linear

Details

Challenges went through a few different iterations, but the core concept was always the same: if you're going to play your favorite video game anyway, why not track you stats in a way that is both competitive and fun.

We originally wanted to offer groups of friends a fun way to challenge each other, so put emphasis on our creation flow and brought the product to college gaming clubs. Our learnings then lead us towards hosting the challenges themselves--it turns out inaction is a powerful force.

This led to "Challenge of the Day", our most successful product with meaningful player retention. We iterated on this concept for quite a while, adding team-based gameplay, a referral program, and the ability for players to create their own paid challenge.

Research

After the web3 collapse in 2022, the team at Rainmaker collectively decided that we still wanted to be a gaming company. Encouraged by my passion of League of Legends and online games, we took a look at the competitive landscape and decided we could offers something new in the "bet on yourself" space.

We did competitive research on companies like gamercraft.com and Z League, and felt they put too much emphasis on money and not enough on fun. After all, if Rainmaker was going to be profitable, it seemed likely players wouldn't be making tons of money. Instead, they'd have to love the service enough to essentially pay for it.

Additionally, our V1 launch was supported by extensive testing with college gaming clubs. They were an easy way to find the types of players we wanted, so we would sponsor a challenge for them and gather feedback in online sessions.

Those research calls led us to launch "Challenge of the Day," rather than emphasizing creating your own challenge.

Components

We needed to design 10+ new components for this project. Take a look at some of them and their corresponding screens by clicking below.

Analytics & Iteration

After launching "Challenge of the Day", we saw our first solid traction and results. Our 30 day retention was as high as 30%, and our users grew steadily into the thousands.

However, our analytics also told us something difficult to accept--our monetization strategies were not working. Rather than continue to funnel marketing money into something with a negative LTV, we worked to iterate on the model to see if we could grow organically.

Final Thoughts & Self-Serve

Ultimately, we pivoted away from Challenges due to the difficulty of monetizing a game that could be cheated quite easily. The video games with open APIs often have very fierce competition, and good players can create new accounts to "Smurf" on less good players, inflating their scores. This made challenges a fun but often frustrating experience, and one that felt like the wrong direction long term.

To solve for this issue, we made a final push for "Self-Serve" challenges--putting the onus on community and players to create challenges they would want to participate in. The community continued to play despite our focus elsewhere until the restructuring of Rainmaker into PRISM recently.
Thanks for playing!
You can view the real site here.