I turned you into a trading card with (client-side) AI
Your soul will belong to me!
This is my most elaborate article yet, covering my full journey building my new indie project, Summon Self, from conception to initial release.
This app turns you into a trading card, with personalised stats, graphics, typing, and rarity. You can trade these cards IRL to create a full collection of your friends.
I applied client-side AI models using MobileCLIP, CoreML, and on-device image classification to generate personalised stats from your own photos.
I combined these with Metal Shaders and the Vision Framework to turn you into a trading card, including graphical effects across 4 different card rarities: Common to Secret Rare.
I pulled everything together using SwiftUI, Swift Concurrency, and SwiftData.
Download Summon Self on the App Store today!
Share your favourite creations and your rarest cards, either in the comments or on the Twitter/LinkedIn/BlueSky threads!
As a 90s kid, I was the perfect demographic to get sucked into the early 2000’s Yu-Gi-Oh craze. I had a deep fascination with Pegasus*, the foppish creator of the card game, who possessed a magic eye that could trap people’s souls in trading cards.
Since watching the anime at age seven, I’ve been fixated on the feeling of power that trapping someone’s soul in a trading card must bring. Relentlessly. Like Kaiba, I mastered cutting-edge technologies in order to achieve my objectives.
Today, client-side artificial intelligence brings me all the tools I need to make this dream a reality.
I have a simple, beautiful, vision:
My app turns you into a trading card, with personalised stats, graphics, typing, and rarity. You can trade these cards IRL to create a full collection of your friends: a social trading-card binder.
Today we’re going to follow my journey bringing this vision alive: from concept, to POC, to MVP, to the App Store.
*Unfortunately, with Pegasus, I backed the wrong horse entirely. My wife, also a big millennial Yu-Gi-Oh fan, actually fancied Marik.
The paywall below goes down on 23 June, when the full article will be emailed to free subscribers. Subscribe now if you haven’t already! Free subs can’t read it yet, but please download Summon Self on the App Store. At time of publishing I haven’t built trading yet, but I hope to release this very soon, alongside more export methods, better shaders, and accessibility features.
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