▶ Play QuizBuzz ↗
Live game · works best on a phone
QuizBuzz is a daily quiz game for family and friends: quick enough for one round a day, social enough to challenge people you know, and polished enough to feel like a real app rather than a side project. Streaks keep people coming back, levels and badges reward progress, and live multiplayer turns a solo quiz into something to play together.
It was also an experiment. Could one designer take a product from first idea to an installable, store-ready app using nothing but Claude Code? No separate engineering team, no hand-written code, and no design hand-off. Just a conversation, a phone in hand, and a lot of iteration.
Every screen, interaction, database rule, serverless function and deployment setting in QuizBuzz was written, debugged and shipped through Claude Code. The split of responsibilities stayed consistent from the first commit to the last:
The git history tells the story. Work came in bursts: long, focused sessions on a handful of days, with each commit a small, reversible step.
A single commit introduced the daily quiz app, then called QuizMate, later renamed QuizBuzz. From that moment it was a working app to react to, not a spec to debate.
Sound effects, a mascot, bonus rounds, subject badges and a level-up moment. Four new question formats: true/false, arrange, fill-in-the-blank and picture. The streak flame went through three rebuilds, from CSS to SVG to a Lottie animation, before it felt right.
About 1,500 more questions in three batches, plus new Arts and Environment categories. Three new modes: Sudden Death, Survival and Blitz. The Play tab and Leaderboard became full pages, with a tappable player card. Then the iOS glassmorphism redesign, with the animated gradient background refined across roughly ten passes.
Online multiplayer with room codes and a lobby, then live emoji reactions and real-time chat with an unread badge and sound. Much of the day went on getting the mobile keyboard to behave on iOS. The login screen was redesigned along the way.
Web Push notifications: a scheduled daily reminder and alerts when a friend challenges you. Then the PWA and Play Store build: manifest, icons, service-worker caching and asset links.
One quiz a day, a streak card with an animated flame, and bonus rounds. Small daily habits, rewarded visibly.
Daily, Sudden Death, Survival and Blitz, drawing on a bank of 1,800+ questions in five formats: multiple choice, true/false, arrange, fill-in-the-blank and picture.
XP, levels, subject badges and a leaderboard with a podium. Tap any player to open their profile card.
Play with Friends: create or join a room with a code, wait in a lobby, then compete live with emoji reactions and in-quiz chat.
A scheduled daily reminder and friend-challenge alerts, delivered as Web Push so the app feels alive between sessions.
A full PWA: it installs to the home screen and caches offline. Packaged with the assets for a Play Store build.
Claude Code is fast at building, which makes taste the scarce part. The look was never specified up front. It was discovered by building, looking, and redirecting, over and over.
Deep navy backgrounds, translucent dark-blue cards and vivid purple calls to action. The light/dark toggle was removed altogether so one look could be made excellent.
Floating orbs became an animated mesh gradient with heavy grain, then a multi-blob version that drifts across screens, all tuned so text always stays readable on mobile.
A mascot, level-up arrows, a flame that breathes and sounds routed to the loudspeaker on iOS. Delight in the small moments, within a clean layout.
What the history shows about building a product this way:
All of it was chosen, wired and deployed through Claude Code:
QuizBuzz shows what a designer can do with an AI pair that writes the code: a real-time multiplayer game with authentication, notifications and an installable app, taken from idea to store-ready in under two weeks. The tool compressed building. It didn't replace deciding what was worth building, or how it should feel.