After the success of Popcoin in the last build challenge I’ve been encouraged to take another stab at it.

This round my entry is taking a huge shift away from everything business and diving head long into the gaming world. I’ve never built a game before (unless this counts) so while I don’t expect to win any awards I do aim to make this a fun and engaging game while also creating an easy to understand and multi faceted open source application showcasing a strong handful of Stellar’s most primary and powerful features.

Gameplay Concept

The game play and concept is simple. Create and trade glyphs from a pixel grid with a limited set and number of colors. Each color represents its own cryptocurrency code. You create your own collection of glyphs and then begin to trade those glyphs in your collection with glyphs from other users. As you trade glyphs back and forth you collect the colors which made up those glyphs. The more you trade the more colors you collect and thus the more detailed and colorful glyphs you can create. Each trade then is made up of many various color cryptocurrencies within the Stellar network. Stellar holds a currency ledger for each user containing what and how much of each color they have to use.

That’s pretty much it. Simple, yet fun and informative. Seems like a perfect blend to me. What do you think? Any great ideas either for either gameplay or for features I should surface from the Stellar SDK?

Early Progress


This could be cool. How do colors come into being originally?

    jed It's a set array based off of Google's Material Design palette.

      No I mean how do I get a color token?

        12 days later

        I like the idea of using colors as assets. But I have two questions (and they may sound hostile or stupid, but I'm not trying to be hostile, I'm not a native English speaker and just can't express myself in other terms):

        1. What is the incentive for anyone to play this game if they can already create multicolored glyphs on any drawing software in their computers?
        2. What does it have to do with Stellar as a decentralized ledger? These colors mean nothing outside the app. They could be stored in an SQL database of your choice inside your app. It seems you're just using the Stellar network as a database.
        3. If entry is free and trading is free, what prevents me from creating infinite glyphs and trading them infinitely with everyone until I get all the colors (or whatever may be the goal of someone playing this game)?

          jed You'll get colors a number of different ways. When you sign up, periodically day by day as you use the app or unlock hidden levels and tiers. However the main way you'll obtain colors is simply by trading for them. When you trade one of your glyphs for another user's glyph you'll gain whatever colors made up the glyph you just traded for.

            fiatjaf All good questions. Primarily the app is designed to be a fun/simple developer tutorial on Stellar, not the world's next greatest trading game. With that said however:

            1. The incentive is that you can trade / collect glyphs with other users. So while you could create glyphs on your computer, where's the fun / point in that? With the game you can collect glyphs from other users. Think trading cards or a sort of https://www.neonmob.com/ spin off.

            2. All correct. The point isn't really because it makes a ton of sense, it's to open source the app to showcase the Stellar SDK for developers wanting a more robust and unique use case to study.

            3. Because that's not how the game will work. Trading a glyph will use up those colors from your collection. The only way to keep collecting colors will be to not use them. Make sense?

            Thanks for the questions!

              Ok, I guess I like all these experimentations with custom assets and noveau forms of trading them. Issuing game assets as Stellar assets is just as nice (it would be nicer if an existing popular online game started to issue its internal money as assets on Stellar, but that's ok) as issuing IOUs of any kind.

              However, I don't like that Colorglyph isn't encouraging the decentralization part of Stellar. It wouldn't make sense if each app used its own assets on Stellar and these assets could never be traded with anyone outside the scope of that app or used for anything besides what that app says it's used for, right?

              I don't know if I'm being clear enough here, of if what I'm saying makes sense.

                fiatjaf I think you may misunderstand what decentralization means. It doesn't mean your money or tokens can be used anywhere to buy anything. Decentralization means something typically controlled at a high level can now be controlled and managed at a much smaller local scale. In this sense Stellar is decentralizing finance but tokens and currencies within Stellar are not as that term just doesn't apply.

                It would be crazy to assume or expect that any token within Stellar would or should be a valid form of currency anywhere other than it's own context. That simply isn't possible nor would it make sense even if it were.

                Now with that said I could see some value and interest in allowing color tokens from Colorglyph to be used or transferrable to any other color based games I or others were to make in the future, but if you think you should be able to take color tokens from Stellar and just walk down to the grocery store and buy some bananas with them well that's just crazy.

                If that's not what you're saying my apologies, I just think maybe we have a different understanding of what decentralization actually means.

                  No, that's not what I'm saying. "Decentralization" wasn't the right word for what I was trying to convey, and I still don't have a good one.

                  I don't think you should be able to use Colorglyph colors to buy groceries. I was just saying that it doesn't make a lot of sense to use a decentralized public ledger to take care of a token that is tied in all aspects to a centralized issuer. But maybe it does, if only for transparency. Also, this isn't even true of Colorglyph, since its colors can be traded for Lumens, for example, if only there are people who want to do that trade.

                  Anyway, I was just trying to say, in the previous comment, that I tend to like more if Stellar apps and Stellar assets are interfacing with many different users, uses and real-world entities, but this is just my opinion at the moment.

                    fiatjaf And I appreciate your opinion and the discussion. It drives products into better and better spaces. In the end we may disagree a bit on what any one application or token should be or do but I do appreciate your comments. So thank you.

                      12 days later

                      Finally got a good designer on board and have made some serious progress recently!

                      Here are a couple of the recent screenshots:


                      6 days later

                      Nearing completion!

                      Ping me if you'd like beta access.

                      tyvdh changed the title to Colorglyph – Trading game backed by custom Stellar tokens .

                      Is there a URL we can try yet?

                        Lots of weird and crazy glyphs are already being made by the beta community. Here are some of my favorites.






                        5 months later

                        How did you handle account creation and more specifically minimum account balances?