Duckademy

Two apps, one game. The Apple TV draws a rune and shows both strokes live; each player traces it with a finger on their own iPhone. Pairing, the live strokes and the score all travel over the local network, with no backend anywhere in the loop.

A party game on a television cannot ask five people to make an account and join a lobby. And the same rune drawn small, off-centre or from the bottom up is still the same rune, so scoring had to judge the shape rather than the coordinates.

Seven ducks of 31 frames each is more texture than an Apple TV should hold at once, so the animation store keeps exactly one atlas: it clears the current one, loads the next on its own serial queue, and cancels the previous load when you keep flicking through the roster. The swap is staged rather than hidden — a sparkle placeholder and a short crossfade — so the loading reads as part of the game.

Fréchet distance compares trajectories rather than clouds of points, which is exactly what a stroke is. Running it twice — against the reference and against the reference reversed — is what stopped punishing anyone who draws bottom-up, and the density of sampled points turned out to be the latency dial for the whole comparison.