Introducing WordChase - The first social game connected with Steem!

Hello everyone! I wanted to take some time before the holiday to officially announce something I’ve been working on for the past couple of months. It’s a social game that I initially built a number of years ago and launched on Facebook (when Facebook games were a thing) but now have modified to allow logging in and making in-game purchases with Steem!

For those of you who want to jump right in and try it out you can find it at:

Word Chase - https://game.playwordchase.com

On the other hand, if you want to hear some more details about my experiences creating and running the game and eventually integrating it with Steem - then read on!

In 2012 I worked for a company that made social games mostly on Facebook. I had often worked on side projects but I usually got distracted by the next shiny new thing that came along and never saw the projects through to completion. Finally I decided that I wanted to make my own game and actually finish it and put it live for people to play.

So I spent over a year building a word game that I created called Word Chase and released it on Facebook in the middle of 2013. Without any advertising I was able to grow the game to about 100 DAU (Daily Active Users) and for a time was making over $100 / month selling the in-game currency - with 30% going to Facebook of course.

Some people got really, really into it and played thousands of games! It was really great to have built and released something that people who I didn’t know enjoyed and actually paid to play! I continued to work on the game and add new features over the next year or two but it was hard to really grow it any more and I had less and less time to devote to it.

Since I didn’t want to spend money on advertising to try to grow the game even more, over time I stopped making as many updates and posts to the fan page so the number of players slowly dwindled. I never shut the game down though. It has been up and running ever since its initial release and some people do still play it from time to time.

Anyway, fast forward to the past couple months and I had recently learned about Steem and thought that it would be a neat project to allow people to log in to the game and make in-game purchases using Steem!

I don’t intend for it to really gain much popularity or make money, it’s really just a proof of concept for integrating Steem into existing applications as well as an opportunity for me to learn more about Steem development.

Allowing logins through SteemConnect V2 was pretty simple (although the documentation was a bit lacking - I submitted a pull request which was approved and merged to update the documentation for the sc2-sdk here: https://github.com/steemit/sc2-sdk/pull/27 so hopefully others will have an easier time of it in the future).

The more interesting part was accepting payments. Using SteemConnect for transactions is a bit of a disconnected process. A new page is opened with the SC2 URL to make the transaction and once it’s done there’s no callback or app-specific messaging or anything so the user is just left to figure out that they need to close that tab/window and go back to the original one.

So what I ended up doing is showing the SC2 transfer page in an iFrame within a modal dialog over top of the game web page. This way the player stays within the game experience. In the background as soon as the transfer page is shown it will poll the @wordchase account every few seconds for new transfers that come in.

Once the transfer is completed the game JavaScript will pick it up through the account history polling and automatically close the modal dialog window and make a call to the server to validate the transaction and credit the player with their purchase.

Additionally, I made a Steem-specific section in the leaderboards so you can see only Steem players and filter out the Facebook players. You can also invite your SteemIt friends to play and challenge them to a game!

I should note that this is all being run off of a micro EC2 instance, so in the unlikely event that there is a sudden flood of Steem players we’ll have to see how all of this holds up. Also while I tried to test everything as much as possible, there could still definitely be some bugs or issues. Feel free to contact me here or in steemit.chat if you run into an issue - especially relating to a purchase - and I’ll do my best to resolve it right away.

Again - I consider this mostly a proof of concept for integrating Steem into various third party sites and applications. I hope that by seeing this game some people will be inspired to integrate Steem into their projects! The more things that Steem can be used for, the more value the token will have which will be a big benefit to us all.

In closing - I hope you enjoy the game, and feel free to challenge me - but be warned, i’m pretty good! Also I may decide to give out a prize for the first SteemIt player to beat all 75 single-player levels!

Help Support My Projects!

If you would like to support my projects and/or my ideas and vision for the future of the Steem platform, I would greatly appreciate your witness vote. To cast your vote you can:

• Go here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses
• Scroll to the bottom
• Write yabapmatt and vote or set yabapmatt as a proxy
• Use Steem Connect to vote for me as a witness
• Or Use Steem Connect for proxying your witness votes to me