I turned you into a trading card with (client-side) AI
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.
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:
Today we’re going to follow my journey bringing this vision alive: from concept, to POC, to MVP, to the App Store.
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