Flappy Musk

Inspiration

Besides the obvious Elon/Twitter takeover joke, our game was inspired by our need to build super simple products that non-crypto natives could understand and enjoy, because the value prop of web3 should be obvious.

Our team has been experimenting with play-to-earn gaming for about 8 months now. In January, we attempted to build an MMO RPG called www.metarashtra.com, but hit too many roadblocks to proceed. One of our biggest learnings from this experience was that serious gamers are probably not yet the right audience to build P2E games for, as they care a lot about legacy, integrity, and the intent behind which people play games, and don't want P2E games yet. Web3 natives on the other hand, are more often than not, not serious gamers. But everyone loves hypercasual games, and casual players have no such moral objections to p2e, and are a much easier audience to build for. We made sure to try to simplify our experience as much as possible, so that we could make onboarding as seamless as the current infrastructure allows.

What it does

Flappy Musk is a super simple, super beginner friendly, and super shareable play-to-earn meme game built on the Polygon Network. Our goal with this project was to create a very low friction and fun on-chain P2E experience, and hopefully onboard a bunch of new people into the web3 ecosystem.

How it works is:

Every day there is a tournament with a prize pool of 25 MATIC, which is awarded to players based on their highscore.
Players have to connect their wallet and pay a 0.5 MATIC participation fee to take part in the tournament.
Once the tournament ends, players can come back and collect their rewards based on their final position on the leaderboard.
If a player does not wish to connect their wallet, they can also play for free, but in this case, they will not be eligible for the prize pool.

How we built it

The app essentially has 3 parts - the full stack nextjs application, the solidity smart contracts and the Unity game itself.

The game was built in Unity with all the assets being custom designed by the team. The full stack web app was built in NextJS with Tailwind, Ethers and React.

The deployer creates a tournament and locks the prize pool amount. When the user plays to earn, he sends some Matic to the game, and upon playing the game, his highscore is added to the tournament contract. The tournament contract takes the highest value across multiple plays. When the tournament is over, it sorts itself out and transfers the prize according to the distribution decided during creation. The prize can then be collected by the players by via the pull payments strategy.

Challenges we ran into

Ensuring all the three components (web, games and blockchain) work in sync.
On chain distribution of rewards based of the scores a user has got.
Ensuring the product experience isn't limited by device or browser based limitations.
Ensuring safe server client communication via encryption

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Less than 14 days after launch, we have already:

Received Twitter shout outs from JD Kanani (Polygon Co-Founder), Akshay BD (SuperTeamDAO), and dozens of others
Hit 15000+ unique plays on the game, with 400+ playing to earn
Been #3 Product of the Day on Launch day on Product Hunt
Been trending in the Web3 top 10 on Product Hunt since launch
Been the reason that dozens of people created a MetaMask account

What we learned

If your experience is fun enough, people will take the trouble to onboard themselves into web3 for it
People should not need to understand crypto to enjoy web3 products
Serious gamers are probably not ready for web3 yet
Simple experiences and great UI make all the difference

What's next for Flappy Musk

Our goal is to build an entire arcade of super simple, beginner friendly, and shareable on-chain experiences to bring as many new people into the Web3 world as possible. With Flappy Musk, the value proposition is obvious. A user does not need to understand crypto to understand how the game works. We believe that if we can simplify the experience as much as possible, and create experiences that are fun enough, our games will be worth the initial friction of getting into Web3. I think we are already starting to see some of this behaviour with our first game, as there are already repeat users who come and play every day, many of whom created a MetaMask wallet just for Flappy Musk. We are already building the next few games. Soon we will have our own, super beginner friendly non-custodial wallet, decreasing the friction even more