I built a flag matching game in 6 days. It was played more than 45k times in 2 weeks

I built a flag matching game called Flag Match in 6 days that was played more than 45k times in 2 weeks.

It’s a simple game where you need to match the flag to the country name. I launched it on Product Hunt and it got 150+ upvotes, ranking #6 on the day of the launch. The game also became the #1 product of the week on Product Hunt in the Education category.

It was featured in the press by Cenital and JustGeek. The game was also shared on Reddit, Twitter, and Hacker News. It received a lot of positive feedback and encouragement from the community.

What is Flag Match?

Flag Match is a simple game where you need to match the flag to the country name. There are 236 countries and territories in the world, and you need to recognize as many as you can. The game is designed to be played on mobile devices with multi-touch support.

When you make a match, the matched pair disappears and you get a point. A new pair appears, and you need to continue matching to beat the game. If you make a mistake, the pair remains visible, and you lose your match streak. The game ends when you match all the pairs.

There are continents that you can choose from, so you can focus on a specific region. When you play, you can build up a match streak for each consecutive correct answer. The game is timed, so you need to be quick to beat other players. The game tracks your matches and mismatches to calculate your match streak and match accuracy.

When you finish the game, you can share your score on social media and challenge your friends to beat it. Your score may be shown on the leaderboard if you are among the top 100 players.

The Flag Match website has a flags section where you can learn more about the flags of the world. You can see the flags of all countries and territories, and learn interesting facts about them.

Flag Match is a fun and educational game that helps you to learn more about the world. It’s a great way to test your knowledge and challenge yourself to get a high score.

Technologies used

The game is built with Ruby on Rails 7.1 and uses the SQLite database to store all the information (countries, their flags, games, and scores). The front-end is powered by Importmaps, Stimulus.js and Tailwind CSS. I deploy it to a VPS with Kamal.

This is my second project that uses SQLite as a production database. I like it because it’s simple to set up and use. It’s also very fast and reliable. For my needs, it proved to be a great choice. I don’t need to scale the database horizontally, so SQLite is a perfect fit for me.

I also use Telebugs to monitor the game’s errors. It’s a great tool that helps me to keep the game running smoothly. I get notified on Telegram when something goes wrong, so I can fix it quickly. Actually, I did catch a nasty bug that way and fixed it before it caused any problems.

Why I built it

Last year, I built a similar game called Matcharoo that didn’t get much traction. I wanted to try again and see if I could build something that people would enjoy playing. I knew that it had the potential to go viral, so I decided to try again.

In June, I saw the success of One Million Checkboxes and it gave me the motivation to build Flag Match. Although these games are very different, somehow it game me the push I needed to start working on it.

Technical challenges

The original game mechanics was broken

I took the code from Matcharoo and adapted it to build Flag Match. I added new features, improved the design, and fixed some bugs. I started with the exact copy of the code and instead of matching English words, I changed it to match flags to country names.

The game was simple to build, but I faced some challenges along the way. The biggest challenge was to make the game fair for everyone. When people started playing it, I noticed that some of them abused the game by memorizing the order of the flags that appear.

This revealed a problem with the original game mechanics. People who memorized the order of the flags could match them very quickly and get a high score. This was unfair to people who didn’t know about this and had to rely on their memory.

It was a real head-scratcher for me. I didn’t know how to fix it without changing the game mechanics. At first, I implemented a detection mechanism that punished players for doing this kind of run. However, it didn’t work well and people complained that they were being punished for playing the game normally.

After another day of thinking, I came up with a solution:

• I added a delay between the appearance of the flags. This way, people who relied on the order of the flags mechanics would be slowed down. If you know the flags, you can match them faster than the cheating players
• I randomized the order of the pairs that appear a little bit. This way, people who memorized the order would be thrown off

Cheaters found a way to cheat

Someone hacked the game by using a script to show the pairs as numbers. Since Flag Match is mostly written in JavaScript, it was easy to do. I changed some things to make it harder to cheat like that, but since this is a client-side game, it’s impossible to prevent all cheating. However, it’s absolutely possible to make it harder to cheat.

Some people figured out that they could cheat by submitting fake scores to the leaderboard. I added a few checks to prevent this from happening and it seems to be working well.

Reception

The game was well received by the community. People liked the game and shared it with their friends. It was played more than 45k times in 2 weeks, which is amazing. I got a lot of positive feedback and encouragement from the players.

I was especially happy to see that children enjoyed playing the game. It’s great to see that they are learning about the world and having fun at the same time. I hope that the game will inspire them to learn more about the world and explore new cultures.

This is my most successful project so far. I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished.

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