How We Built Pickle Picker

At Potato Battery Games, we love building party games that bring people together. After launching Chapeau Shuffle — our fishbowl-style word guessing game (yes, "chapeau" means "hat" in French) — we wanted to tackle another classic: the "Would You Rather" game.

The result is Pickle Picker, a web-based party game where players face impossible dilemmas and discover what their friends really think. No accounts needed, no app downloads — just open the site and start debating whether you'd rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck.

Both games share the same philosophy: minimal friction, maximum fun. Get people playing in seconds, not minutes.

The Anonymous Question Rating System

One feature we're particularly proud of is the question rating system. Players can rate any question with a thumbs up or down — completely anonymously, no login required.

How It Works

When you vote, we hash your IP address with SHA-256. This creates a unique anonymous identifier — you can vote, but we never know who you are. Think of it like dropping your vote into a hat.

But here's the interesting part: preventing spam while keeping the experience fun.

Weight Decay Algorithm

We implemented an exponential decay system for vote weights:

weight = 0.93^n

Where n is the number of votes you've cast in the current session. Your first vote carries full weight (1.0), but subsequent votes decay exponentially — 0.93, 0.86, 0.80, and so on. Once your weight drops below 0.001, your votes become purely decorative.

The decay resets after one hour of inactivity, so legitimate users returning later get their full voting power back.

Making It Fun

Rather than silently ignoring spam, we leaned into it. The UI responds with escalating animations as you click:

• 1-6 votes: Basic squash animation
• 7-14 votes: Shake animation kicks in
• 15-29 votes: Mega-squash with confetti
• 30+ votes: Fire pulse effect

And when you hit the zero-weight threshold? A friendly message appears: "Your clicks are now decorative." Players often try to reach this state just to see what happens.

Self-Hosted AI with Ollama

For generating new questions, we run our own LLM server using Ollama instead of calling OpenAI or Anthropic APIs.

Why Self-Host?

Three reasons:

1. Cost control: With potentially thousands of question generation requests, per-token API pricing adds up fast. Our Ollama server runs on fixed infrastructure costs.
2. Data privacy: Questions users generate stay on our servers. We don't send prompts to third-party APIs, which matters for a game that might involve spicy content.
3. Offline capability: Our generation pipeline works even if external APIs are down. No dependency on third-party uptime.

The Setup

We run Ollama with an open-source model and carefully crafted prompts. The key challenge is ensuring both options are genuinely difficult to choose between — questions where 90% of people pick the same answer aren't interesting.

AI-generated questions go through manual moderation before appearing on the site — we review and approve content by hand.

Multi-Platform Roadmap

The web version at picklepicker.lol is live, but we're thinking bigger.

Alexa Voice Skill

Imagine playing "Would You Rather" on a road trip, completely hands-free. "Alexa, give me a pickle." The skill reads the question aloud, players shout their answers, and Alexa tallies the votes. Perfect for family dinners or long car rides.

This is actively in development — voice-first games are an underexplored space.

Telegram Bot

Group chats are natural homes for "Would You Rather." A Telegram bot could post daily questions, track group statistics, and let friends challenge each other asynchronously. Low development overhead, high engagement potential.

Native Apps

Eventually, we'll consider iOS and Android apps. But honestly? The web version works great on mobile browsers, and avoiding app store friction aligns with our "play in seconds" philosophy. Native apps would only make sense for features that truly require them — maybe offline play or push notifications.

SEO Experiments and Learnings

Building a content site with multiple landing pages taught us a few things about SEO.

Dynamic OG Image Generation

Every question page has its own Open Graph image, generated on-demand using Next.js image generation. When someone shares a question on social media, it shows a custom preview with the actual dilemma. This dramatically improved click-through rates from social shares.

Programmatic Sitemap

Our sitemap.xml includes static pages and dynamically fetches category pages from the database. Adding a new category automatically updates the sitemap.

Structured Data

We implemented JSON-LD schemas throughout:

• FAQPage for question collections
• WebApplication for the game itself
• CollectionPage for category listings

Google Search Console shows rich results appearing for some queries, though the impact is hard to measure definitively.

Tech Stack Deep Dive

For the technically curious, here's what powers Pickle Picker:

Next.js 16 with App Router: We went all-in on React Server Components. The majority of our pages are server-rendered with zero client-side JavaScript for the initial content. Interactive elements hydrate on demand.

PostgreSQL + Drizzle ORM: Drizzle gives us type-safe database access without the weight of Prisma. Migrations are straightforward, and the query builder feels natural to TypeScript developers.

TypeScript 5: Strict mode everywhere. The codebase has zero any types — we learned that lesson the hard way on previous projects.

Tailwind CSS 4: The new version with CSS-first configuration simplified our setup significantly. Custom properties for our design tokens (pickle green, accent colors) work seamlessly.

Sentry: Error tracking and performance monitoring. We catch issues before users report them, and the performance traces help identify slow database queries.

What's Next

We're actively working on Party Mode — the big-screen experience where a host displays questions while players vote on their phones via QR code. Real-time results, debates, and probably some arguments about whether invisibility really is better than flight.

Try the game at picklepicker.lol. Generate some questions, rate a few, and let us know what you think.

And if word games are more your style, check out Chapeau Shuffle — the hat awaits.

Built with questionable decisions and excessive pickle puns by Potato Battery Games.