Farville
Plant, harvest, and earn with your internet frens.
About
The problem it solves Farville is a farming simulation game inspired by Zynga’s famous Farmville on Facebook. The idea was to create a game with highly social and viral dynamics directly within the social feed, allowing players to play with their internet (Farcaster) friends. The game itself is very casual, simple and to play. The strategic aspect and the game’s economy are very important, but the social aspect is the core. We utilized Farcaster primitives, such as shareable mini-app images posted on the social feed, to create these viral loops. For example, requests for seeds/crops to share in the feed, profile pictures, and achievements (like finding a golden crop). These social loops kept players engaged for months. Additionally, from this experience, we decided to write an article on how to create a viral app, which went highly viral and inspired others to explore this topic: https://paragraph.com/@builders-garden/viral-farcaster-mini-apps Smart Contract Address(es) 0xd53fc616b700bb9e31aa29c03d776bb06bccd4cc 0x503de83d7131bb5b4a6c54f1d6f416b7f3b0021a Other Onchain Proof Farville multisig receiving payments for Farmer Powers 0x0FAEAE8d71E2bc1b559eF2bA85e995F63aF6bED9 With Farming powers, users can donate to accelerate the growth time for all players in the game. Optimism Atlast submission tracking the onchain stats: https://atlas.optimism.io/project/0x59e17037d11869aaa2dfcaa96a2695bb849d6c1edc2cc8bb4d4c1545b8284318
How it's made
Challenges we ran into A big challenge was creating a game with strong social dynamics directly embedded in the social feed to create social loops. The primary challenges were correctly balancing the game’s economy, especially at the beginning. We received immense participation and user feedback, which led us to improve the game over the months. Another significant challenge was fighting bots, particularly when we introduced the weekly reward in USDC to be split among players on the leaderboard. Overall, a major challenge was scaling the game and going from 0 to 5,000 daily users, which put significant strain on our infrastructure. Initially, we used Vercel, but the costs became unsustainable, so we decided to switch to our own self-hosted and more scalable infrastructure.