The problem Candy Kingdom Match-3 solves

Most crypto-native projects carry large risk due to their financial nature incentivizing users and bots to intrusively spam social media channels, and create new opportunities for bad actors to attack in the hopes of monetary gain.
This has led to significant reputational damage to the space as web3 projects are dominated by negative headlines that scare away mainstream audiences, and even most crypto-native users don't understand the benefits or use-cases of web3 and are quick to buy into centralized or copycat projects that end up in catastrophic loss of user funds.

Our project is a mobile first casual game that eliminates these risks by internally restricting the trade of ingame items, tokens and NFT's, thus removing all incentive for black-hat hacks, social engineering attacks or liquidity draining botfarms.
We created a special set of contracts that use Real Flow Resource Objects internally to record the players status and achievements. Scores, characters, inventory and more are safely stored inside an account on the blockchain, and have strict protocols about how those assets can be transferred and used, this means we can restrict their trade while respecting the Resource oriented approach of flow contracts and players still have full control over their account itself.

With this web3 first approach users will be gently encouraged to create or link an account with a Flow compatible wallet inside of the gacha game, allowing composability with all avatar projects on Flow as users compete for high scores and bragging rights in a dedicated public square.
After linking their wallet they will be able to purchase ingame currency from the store with either credit card, Flow or USDC

Our goal is to reach the billion+ mobile gamers in a way that feels so intuitive they aren't even aware blockchain technology is involved, instead of stressing about token prices they will be able to focus on the fun and forget about their worries for a few moments each day.

Challenges we ran into

Building both a game from scratch as well as a web3 solution in a single week was a monumental task for only two people, we used an AI art assistant to ease the burden of raw output (notably with character illustrations which were then touched up by our artist) so that it was possible to meet the hackathon deadline, this was important because collecting characters is the core mechanic of all mainstream appeal mobile gacha games.

To efficiently make the best use of our time between both game and Flow contract development we chose to get the game to bare MVP functionality, the core gameplay is there but outside of that a lot of extended functionality including multiplayer is currently missing but planned.
We did this because we didn't have any prior experience building on Flow or writing Cadence and wanted to make sure we could integrate our game into Flow within the time limit, there was a learning curve as most documentation was in the form of video tutorials or articles and it was difficult to find technical reference.

We chose Unity as our game engine due to it having the Flow SDK ready to go, as well as it being the most familiar for prototyping mobile games, but we also found near the end of the sprint we were unable to test anything live because the Flow-Unity SDK only supports emulation for blockchain testing