dopa is a browser-based “dopamine simulator” — a curated playground of oddly-satisfying toys you pop, fidget, squish, and slice for a little hit of calm. It brings a genre that’s huge across Korea and China to the West with flagship craft: procedural sound, real physics, and a kind-by-design meta-loop. No download — it plays instantly and works offline.
Project info
- Client
- dopa
- Services
- Web Development · UI/UX Design · Brand Identity · Interaction Design
- Year
- 2026
- Stack
- Next.js 16 · TypeScript · Three.js · Web Audio API · Zustand · better-auth · Neon · Stripe
The problem
The “satisfying toy” category is enormous in Asia but, in the West, mostly cheap, ad-stuffed clones. The opening was a single, premium, trustworthy home for it — the opposite of a doomscroll, engineered to give rather than take, with no fake urgency and no streak-shaming.
Our approach
The fun core is 100% client-side — nineteen hand-built toys, a live GPU fluid and soft-body physics layer, and a fully procedural Web Audio engine where every sound is synthesized at runtime, no files — so it installs as a fast, offline PWA. Accounts, cloud sync, a global leaderboard, and the dopa+ subscription are progressive enhancements gated behind feature flags, shipped on Next.js 16, better-auth, Neon, Upstash, and Stripe. A companion native app shares the same serverless backend.
