Farconic
Farconic is a Farcaster-native, modular strategy game featuring Yoni Alter’s art. Collect cards of Buildings & Cities, become mayor, earn rewards. Designed as a core for future games and expansions.
Created on 29th June 2024
•
Farconic
Farconic is a Farcaster-native, modular strategy game featuring Yoni Alter’s art. Collect cards of Buildings & Cities, become mayor, earn rewards. Designed as a core for future games and expansions.
The problem Farconic solves
Farcaster currently lacks engaging games for its frames, limiting its potential for interactive entertainment. Most frames focus on tipping, stats, or transfers; there are few options for users seeking fun, strategic, or collectible-based experiences. We addresses this gap by introducing an engaging, collectible-based game, whose core features are designed to allow for continious evolution & expansion.
Farconic is a farcaster-nativecard strategy game: players collect trading cards of iconic buildings, assembling sets of these cards, and building cities. This process combines strategy and social interaction, making the act of collecting cards more engaging. Collecting all the cards of a particular city allows players to claim the title of mayor; earning royalties from all future trades of the buildings in their city. Using frames, gameplay is embedded within social posts, allowing for convenient & social access.
The game’s art is based on Yoni Alter’s acclaimed “Shapes of Cities” series, featuring 61 cities depicted through vibrant, geometric silhouettes of iconic buildings. The artistic foundation of the game broadens its appeal, attracting both art lovers and Farcaster users interested in playing in-feed games.
The modular design means it can grow and adapt over time. The cards' rich metadata means adding new features, collaborations, and expansions is made easy, allowing for new experiences and challenges for players.
Farconic’s core features & NFTs will serve as building blocks for many games, especially on frames. We hope to use the card NFTs, their rich metadata, and Farcaster’s social graphs to create fun, engaging, and educational experiences, inspired by beloved games like Risk or Monopoly.
To spice up the launch, we’ll release a Building per day according to a calendar that we’ve visualized on a Monopoly-inspired board. We’ve got cool events lined up on it, such as raffles, collaborations with Farcaster OGs, Trivia days, and more!
Challenges we ran into
Building Farconic has been both exciting and challenging. One major hurdle is gaining traction on Farcaster. Despite crafting high-quality, visually stunning content, the reach remains disappointingly low. The competition for attention is fierce, and breaking through the noise requires more than just great content—it demands strategic dissemination and continuous engagement. This highlights the ongoing struggle many creators face in achieving meaningful visibility and interaction despite their best efforts. We've managed to grow our Farcaster account to more than 4k followers, and the /farconic channel boasts close to 5k members. We were able to create connections with Farcaster OGs and prominent users, who will make appearances on the game board during launch - aiding us in spreading word about the game to far more users than we could achieve by ourselves.
Techincal side:
One challenge was generating Card images on the fly with dynamic data while staying within the size and load time limits.
The first attempt involved pulling in only the building image from IPFS, and constructing the rest with regular markup and a mix of tailwind and style tags - however this quickly exceeded the 256kb limit imposed by Farcaste frames.
Attempt #2 involved thinning down the markup, replacing the background with its card image and rainbow gradient with a single background image pulled from IPFS, and removing some of the noise in favour of solid colours to reduce complexity.
This got us close, but not enough. The third fix worked: implementing an image-worker middleware service to handle image generation, allowing us to bypass the limit imposed by Frames. However, we were still very conscious of load times and providing a delightful experience for our users - further optimisations included uploading a whole new set of images that were JPG rather than GIF, and optimising API calls for the onchain data by wrapping the calls in an asynchronous Promise.all function.
Tracks Applied (1)
Gaming Track
GAMING with thirdweb
Technologies used
Cheer Project
Cheering for a project means supporting a project you like with as little as 0.0025 ETH. Right now, you can Cheer using ETH on Arbitrum, Optimism and Base.