Caishen is a mobile gaming platform — a small catalogue of games wrapped in a shared chat, payments and account layer, paired with a promo website that reuses the same visual language.
The brief was about consistency more than novelty. The games came from different pods with different histories, and the player shouldn't feel the seams between a game, a chat, the deposit flow and the app-wide home.
The interesting design problem was the lobby — the place you come back to after every game. It's a retention surface disguised as a menu, and it had to survive five game teams all wanting their tile to be the biggest.
How we worked
We started by mapping the player's day: when they open the app, when they switch games, when they pay, when they come back. The cold truth was that most sessions are under three minutes and almost all of them start in the lobby. That shaped the rest — the lobby had to load instantly, show one clear next thing to do, and never ask the player to choose between five visually equal tiles.
The second hard problem was payments. The game teams had inherited their own currency models, deposit flows and receipt screens. I consolidated everything into one system — same deposit sheet, same limits, same confirmation — and let each game extend it with game-specific modifiers. It took four rounds of reviews with three different product owners, but the alternative was a checkout that felt different in every tile.
Chat was the last thing to land. Social layers in gaming apps are almost always an afterthought that becomes a spam channel. I treated chat as a first-class surface from day one — tied to game context, filterable by friends, with moderation tooling built in. Every game team pushed back in review; every one of them was grateful by the time we shipped.
What shipped
- Promo website: positioning, features, downloads
- Mobile app: chats, games, payments, account
- Shared visual language across web and app
Closing note
The brief said 'games' but the job was everything between them. A year later the games still look different by design — the promo site, the lobby, the chat and the deposit flow look like one product. That's where the design value sits.