Overview
Guessor is a social geography game. A player starts with a photograph, privately marks where it was taken, and invites others to guess the place. The product sits at the intersection of photos, maps and the people you want to play with.
The problem
Photographs already carry place. We rarely play with that. Camera rolls become storage. Most geography games use other people's imagery — Street View, stock, a quiz database — so the round is clever without being personal. I wanted a game where the picture could belong to someone in the room, and guessing was a way of paying attention to their life.
The idea
The photograph is the game board. If the picture is yours, the round becomes a conversation: where were you, what were you looking at, why does this corner of the world look like that. The product's job is to make that round easy to create, fair to guess, and worth sharing.
Product / design decisions
Creation has to feel light. You pick a photo, pin the true location, and share a challenge. The true pin stays hidden until the round resolves, otherwise the game collapses. Guessing happens on a real map rather than a multiple-choice list, because the interesting part is spatial judgement, not trivia. I have been careful about making the social layer feel like playing with people rather than publishing into a void — identity, sharing and moderation matter as much as the map.
Engineering
The web client is Next.js and TypeScript. The API is Spring Boot with PostgreSQL for challenge data, players and results. Photographs go to private object storage on Cloudflare R2 rather than sitting on the application server. The map layer uses Leaflet. The interesting work is the join between those pieces: a photo pipeline that can accept large originals, a private location that must not leak in the client, and a guessing flow that stays responsive on a map.
Challenges
Photos are large, messy and personal. Storing them privately, serving them safely and keeping the true coordinates off the client is a product constraint as much as a technical one. Maps make fairness visible — a guess that looks close on a city map can be kilometres out in the countryside — so the scoring model has to feel just without becoming a spreadsheet. Around that sits the ordinary difficulty of a social product: accounts, sharing links, and keeping the community from becoming a problem the game cannot absorb.
What I learned
The core loop is the easy part to describe. Shipping it means building everything around the loop until a stranger can create a round without you in the room. I also learned that a geography game is really a media product. If the photograph feels bad, the map does not save it.
Current status
In active development. The product is public at guessor.com. Details such as player counts are omitted here on purpose — I would rather the work speak than a dashboard.
Links
Repository links are on GitHub where the code is public. I am not publishing internal or employer code here.