Lucky Day — A slot machine
A playful study in motion, chance, and tactile feedback, built to feel good in the hand.
Tech stack
- Swift
- SwiftUI
Stakeholders
- Personal project
- Motion-design study
“Every pull had to feel weighty — chance you can feel in your thumb.”
The real problem
Most on-screen "chance" feels weightless — a number changes and nothing in your body registers the risk. I wanted to solve for the opposite: make a pull feel like it cost something, so a near-miss actually stings.
Before & after
Before: reels that just animate to a result, indistinguishable from a loading spinner.
After: reels with spring, weight, and a haptic on the near-miss — the outcome is felt in the thumb a beat before it's read on screen.
Process
Lucky Day was an excuse to obsess over micro-interactions: the spring of the reels, the haptic on a near-miss, the timing of the payout. I tuned each one by feel, not by number.
It's a small thing, but it's where I worked out a reusable motion vocabulary I now reach for across every project.
Why it matters
The payoff wasn't the slot machine — it was the motion vocabulary that came out of it, which now makes every other project feel more alive for almost no extra cost.
