E. GILLISSIE Subscribe

Case studySprite Sanctuary

A private product for eleven people.

A game my friends and I play ships with a tracker for its collectible sprites. The tracker is bad. So I built a better one.

Then I kept going — and the tracker became the place the squad actually lives: boards, trades, trash talk, a live event wire, and a clerk on duty who answers questions with receipts.

Nobody commissioned it. Eleven people needed a better tool, and it was worth doing well.

What it became

What the tracker turned into.

01Boards & leaderboard

Every player’s collection, tracked live and ranked without mercy.

02Crowns

Mastery crowns for finished lines, and a Hall of Crowns to keep the record.

03Trades

Offers, counter-offers, and a clean ledger of who owes whom.

04Trash Talk

A running room with emoji reactions and @tags — the squad’s actual chat.

05The Wire

An event ticker: every crown, trade, and death, announced as it happens.

06Head to head

Any two players, compared line by line.

07Suggestion Box

Feature requests with votes and comments — the users steer the roadmap.

08The graveyard

A death system, because the game has stakes and the record should too.

LEADERBOARD SEASON 3 1 RIVER 96 2 PATCH 81 3 DOMINO 73 4 WREN 57 Rare Epic Legendary Mythic THE WIRE RIVER claimed a crown · PATCH ⇆ WREN settled a trade · a sprite has died ☠
The board & the Wire — illustrative: the real interface, placeholder data

The Clerk

It has staff.

The Town Square has a clerk — an AI on duty for the squad’s questions. It answers with the live ledger in hand, a written valuation doctrine, memory of its own recent rulings, web search when a question needs the outside world, and citations when it answers. Ask it what a sprite is worth and it shows its work.

TOWN SQUARE what’s a fair price for a Mythic? THE CLERK Two Epics plus a Rare, by the doctrine — Mythics hold a 3–4× Epic floor. The last three Mythic trades on the ledger cleared there. DOCTRINE §3 LEDGER: LIVE
The Clerk — answers with the ledger in hand, and shows its work
TRADE COUNTERED DOMINO OFFERS Epic × 2 Rare × 3 FOR WREN’S Mythic × 1 WREN countered: add a Legendary. The ledger updates the moment it settles.
Trades — offers, counters, a clean ledger

The stack

Built like a product, sized for a squad.

One hand-built page on the front. Behind it, a serverless store carrying boards, chat, trades, events, and reactions behind shared-key auth, with a single-call feed so phones stay light. A native iOS wrapper with a TestFlight pipeline is scaffolded and waiting on paperwork. The whole thing is password-gated and unlisted — it is the squad’s room, not a demo.

Research the need, design the thing, write every word, build every part, keep it alive for its users — one hand, end to end.

The point

Bring me the thing that doesn’t exist yet.

This is what the full range looks like pointed at one small, real problem. If you have one of these — a tool your team needs, a product that should exist, a question nobody has sat with — write to me.

The services and the rest of the range are at Work with Evan.

Evan Gillissie — evangillissie.com Writing · Research · Built work Catalogued by hand @EGillissie on Substack