Girudo

Behind it runs the Girudo Admin Panel, a back-office application where administrators publish content pages, curate creator placements, moderate forums, manage users and roles, run events, and monitor live sessions.

The scope was the full product across 14 or more modules on the consumer side and 17 or more screens on the admin side, with no existing design system on either.

The structural problem underneath all of it is that these are not separate gaps. A player finishing a game cannot jump into a discussion about the format they just played, because the game and the forum live in different products owned by different companies. The community's activity is fragmented not because any one tool is bad but because no tool holds more than one part of it.

On the operations side, a platform with this many surfaces cannot be run manually. Static pages, forums, events, creator placements, user permissions, and live sessions each need administration, and without a unified back office every content update becomes a developer request and every editorial decision becomes a spreadsheet.

**Real-time gameplay** supports up to 4v4 across multiple TCG titles in one interface, with commanders and decklists, customisable state counters for poison, burn, and storm, detailed game logs, and integrated chat. The spectator system is designed as its own experience rather than a read-only version of the player view, with a dedicated stream view and live chat supporting thousands of concurrent viewers.

**Registration** was designed as a 4-step personalisation sequence rather than a form: account creation, avatar upload, TCG preference selection, and player card customisation. By the time a new user reaches the home screen they have an identity and a curated feed rather than an empty dashboard.

**The Creators hub** is a discovery and publishing ecosystem in both light and dark modes. A filterable directory carries tabs for Live Now, Rising Creators, Most Followed, and New on Girudo, with creator cards showing avatar, handle, follower count, live badge, featured thumbnail, TCG tags, rating, views, and mutual-friend indicators. Creator profiles publish across five formats, video, shorts, art, blog, and audio, with a rich blog editor carrying URL embeds, word counts, and reading time, artwork upload with metadata, audio bundles for deck techs and podcasts, and video with engagement metrics. Profiles support theme customisation, animated text, announcement banners, section reordering, branded arena URLs at girudo.com/username, and an impersonation protection banner.

**Teams and Guilds** gives competitive groups the infrastructure they lacked. Team profiles run as a multi-tab experience with sticky navigation across Overview, Roster, Content aggregated from member feeds, Results carrying tournament placements, and a Sponsors wall. A team manager dashboard handles member management, content curation, and profile editing, with a 3-step registration flow.

**Community Forums** provide Reddit-style spaces with a guided 3-step community creation flow, public, restricted, and private privacy models, and a moderation suite carrying granular permission roles across Everything, Posts and Comments, Config, and Users, moderator invitations, and banner and profile customisation. Post creation handles three states covering logged-in with membership, logged-in without, and logged-out, so friction lands where it belongs.

**Profiles, friends, and messaging** carry the social layer with public-facing views, profile stores, multi-theme support, friend discovery with pending and sent request tracking, direct and group messaging, and link sharing for game invites. **The Store Locator** closes the loop back to physical play with a map interface, pin markers, zipcode search, and a browsable store directory.

**The Admin Panel** runs all of it. A section-based CMS page builder lets administrators compose static pages from hero, about, and custom blocks with inline editing, reordering, visibility toggles, and deletion, removing the developer dependency from every content change. An intelligent creator curation engine pairs manual selection with an Auto Mode driven by configurable ranking criteria across highest follower count, fastest growth, most live streams, most posts, highest engagement, and newest join date, over time ranges from 7 days to all time. A tabbed user management interface segments by Active, Admin, Content Creator, Suspended, and Invited with per-user permissions for commenting, forum participation, chat, and content creation. Event and forum operations, a live session monitoring dashboard surfacing total viewers, live streams, and active games, and an audited impersonation system with a persistent active-session banner and a full log of admin, creator, times, duration, and activity notes complete the back office.

All of it sits on a custom design system built from scratch across both applications: a consumer component library with variant-driven light and dark theming covering navigation, buttons, creator cards, avatars, game session cards, step cards, filter bars, modals, sponsor cards, map markers, marquee elements, video players, post blocks, and icon sets, and an admin system with a warm coral and orange accent palette, table-driven layouts, modular sidebar navigation, and reusable modal, dropdown, form, and status badge patterns.

The parts with no precedent took the most time and produced the best work. A lobby for physical card games, a spectator view that is its own experience rather than a read-only player view, and a curation engine that is both editorial and algorithmic all had to be reasoned from what the activity actually is rather than adapted from an existing pattern. That is slower and it is where the product's identity ended up living. The modules I could pattern-match, forums, messaging, profiles, are competent and unremarkable, which is the right outcome for them.