A real-money esports platform, built solo

The problem

When money rides on a score, every part of the product becomes a trust problem. The game had to feel instant on a phone, two players entering the same tournament had to get exactly the same puzzle, and a score arriving from a client could never be taken at face value — all of it shipped by one person, to two app stores.

What I built

• A custom real-time game engine — an 8×8 block-placement game in React Native with Skia and Reanimated, holding 60 FPS with combo scoring and timed mechanics.
• Server-authoritative anti-cheat: the server recomputes every score from batched client moves, checking sequence integrity, timestamp monotonicity and sanity caps.
• A shared seeded RNG that deterministically generates identical piece sequences on client and server, so every entrant plays the same board.
• Real-money payments through Stripe and Apple In-App Purchase with server-side receipt verification, behind one pluggable provider abstraction with idempotency keys.
• A concurrency-safe tournament and ticketing system in PostgreSQL — transactional guards on ticket capacity, entry caps and wallet limits — plus XP and levelling, a timezone-aware daily reward wheel, leaderboards, biometric login, age-gated onboarding and EN/FR localisation.

Result