How Vladers Was Born

Vladers started with a very simple thought.

During the World Cup, I saw a Panini ad on TV and immediately thought:

“Wow… why aren’t they doing this with virtual cards?”

It felt obvious to me. Football fans already love collecting cards, opening packs and chasing rare players. Bringing that experience into a game felt like something that could really work.

A few days later, I started building it.

At the time, I had just started using Claude, and I also decided to try a completely new tech stack recommended to me by ChatGPT. I had a clear picture in my head of what I wanted the game to feel like and, especially, what the cards should look like.

So I built a quick MVP.

The gameplay came together surprisingly fast. The cards did not.

The First Cards Took Forever

One of the biggest challenges from the beginning was creating the visual identity of the cards.

I spent a huge amount of time using AI to generate the first designs. Sometimes I could spend an entire evening just trying to create one template that felt right.

Even after building an internal dashboard to help me reproduce and manage the cards more efficiently, the process was still slow.

A tiny detail could take hours.

A border.

A background.

A lighting effect.

A player composition.

Something that looks simple when you see the final card can take dozens of attempts behind the scenes.

Over time, I learned how to work much faster. Today, I understand much better how to get a strong result quickly, but the final details can still consume a lot of time — and quite a few AI credits.

That has become part of the creation process.

Building Faster With AI

Development of Vladers started at the beginning of July.

And looking at where the game is today, I genuinely think AI has helped skip months of traditional hardcoding.

That doesn't mean the game builds itself.

There are still bugs to solve, systems to rethink, designs that don't work, ideas that need to be removed and plenty of evenings spent trying to understand why something isn't behaving the way it should.

The challenge is still there.

The difference is that I can move much faster.

And as someone who often works and travels alone, there is another side of AI that I didn't expect when I started.

You're never really staring at a problem completely alone.

There is always something you can talk to, challenge an idea with, debug with or ask for another approach.

It doesn't remove the difficulty of building a game, but it changes what is possible for one person to attempt.

Where Vladers Is Today

We are now getting close to the first clean version that can be openly tested.

Vladers has grown far beyond that first MVP.

The goal is to create a football card game that you can enjoy every day without feeling forced into watching ads just to play.

If you're happy with the normal gameplay, the experience is ad-free.

And if you want more reasons to come back, there is already plenty to do through daily and weekly activities, progression and challenges.

And yes… probably even more challenges are coming.

The game is still evolving, but for the first time it feels like the foundation is really there.

This Is Only the Beginning

Vladers began because of one TV ad and one random thought during the World Cup.

A few days later, that thought became an MVP.

Then the MVP became hundreds of cards, systems, designs, experiments and late evenings.

And now we're getting close to putting a clean version into players' hands.

For the first post on this website, I wanted to share where Vladers actually came from rather than simply explain what the game is.

There will be plenty of time for that.

For now, the best introduction is probably to see it for yourself.

Meet Vladers

Watch the video below for a first look at Vladers and the world we're building.

This is the beginning.