YGG PLAY

Generation one worked, but it was carrying an outdated stack and code patterns that had stopped paying for themselves. Refactoring in place would have meant paying the cost twice — once to modernise the foundation, again to unwind everything built on top of it.

The rebuild reset both at once: a Turborepo monorepo on Next.js 15 and React 19, with the design system rebuilt alongside rather than ported.

The hardest problem wasn't rendering — it was the web3 layer. Authentication, staking, and claiming all resolve to wallet signatures, and signing is where web3 products lose people: a modal appears and the user has to decide whether to approve something they can't fully read.

Wiring those flows through thirdweb was the bulk of the work. Making them legible enough that a player could complete a stake or a claim without hesitating was the harder half.

Generation one was live and taking traffic throughout the rebuild, so the switch had to land cleanly the first time — there is no graceful way to half-migrate a platform people are actively using.

It went smoothly, with the entire team in position and working toward a single goal. The platform changed underneath its users without the business missing a beat.

I owned the design system across both generations. DS5 is a comprehensive Chakra-based system with custom scaling, documented in a Storybook library — quests, leaderboards, points and token UI, swap and stake flows, and on-chain identity all render from it.

Headcount moved a lot over the project: two engineers at one point, up to seven, then settling at four. A documented design system is what lets a UI stay coherent across resets like that.