DesiDash: Celebrating the Passion of Indian Festivals on Solana!✨

Aayushi Goel — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 23:35:17 +0000

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition

Category: Best Use of Solana

🎯 What I Built

DesiDash is a high-speed, mobile-first Web3 casual arcade game that captures the vibrant energy and passion of Indian folk festivals. Built using Next.js, it transforms traditional festive celebrations into an interactive Rangoli tap-board game.

To bridge the gap between Web2 gaming speeds and Web3 transparency, the entire real-time gameplay loop leverages MagicBlock Ephemeral Rollups to handle lightning-fast transaction validations under 20ms with absolutely zero gas fees for the user!

❤️ Inspiration & Passion

Passion drives people to create beautiful art, and in India, festival season brings out an unmatched obsession with colors, lights, and community bonding. I wanted to capture this specific "cultural passion" and package it into a fun, addictive mobile dApp that any casual user can enjoy without worrying about complex crypto terms.

🛠️ Technical Execution (How Solana Powers It)

This project is built specifically to qualify for the Best Use of Solana category by pushing the limits of high-frequency onchain interactions:

Gasless Ephemeral Rollup (ER): Every time a player taps a spawning Saffron Diya, the action is instantly validated on MagicBlock's ER context. It removes the slow block times of traditional L1s.
Auto-Commit to Devnet: To secure the assets immutably, player scores are batched and securely auto-committed onto the Solana Devnet after every 50 taps.
Mobile Wallet Adapter (MWA): Tailored perfectly for the Solana Seeker dApp Store with custom user-agent detection to provide a smooth, native connection path on mobile viewports.

🎨 Design Aesthetic

Styled in a bold Neo-Brutalist Light Mode notebook theme utilizing warm cream (#FDFBF7), festive saffron (#FF9933), and royal peacock indigo (#06038D) with chunky 4px black borders to make the gameplay instantly engaging and readable for everyone.

🔗 Live Links & Source Code

GitHub Repository:
Aayu095 / Desi-Dash
DesiDash 🥁 — Mobile-First Web3 Casual Arcade Game

A gasless mobile tap game powered by MagicBlock Ephemeral Rollups on Solana.

Tap faster than the blockchain can blink! Every tap is processed instantly and gaslessly via MagicBlock's Ephemeral Rollup, with final scores committed on-chain every 50 taps.

🚀 Project Overview

DesiDash is a high-speed, mobile-first Web3 casual arcade game that brings the festive spirit of Indian folk-pop to Solana. By integrating MagicBlock Ephemeral Rollups, it delivers sub-20ms gameplay and gasless state processing, demonstrating a seamless, friction-free gaming experience on mobile web and PWA.

✨ Features

Mobile-First PWA
- 📱 Installable on Android homescreen (full PWA manifest + service worker)
- 🔒 Portrait-locked, pull-to-refresh disabled, tap-zoom prevention
- 📳 Haptic feedback via Vibration API on every tap
- 🎨 Indian Folk-Pop Neo-Brutalist design (Saffron / Mehendi / Indigo palette)
Solana Mobile Wallet Adapter (MWA)
- Connects to Phantom, Backpack, Solflare on Android via native MWA intent
- Falls…
View on GitHub
Demo Video:
Live Application: desi-dash-tau.vercel.app

🏃🏿‍♂️ FREE AT DAWN: Survive the Shortest Night in this Gemini-Powered Juneteenth Runner

Aayushi Goel — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 15:08:28 +0000

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam

What I Built

FREE AT DAWN is a dynamically generated, historical survival-runner powered by Google's Gemini API.

Set on the night of June 18, 1865 in Texas, you play as an enslaved person who has just heard whispers that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed two years ago. The enslavers have kept it a secret, but the truth is finally spreading. Your goal is to run toward Galveston to hear General Order No. 3 read aloud at dawn (Juneteenth).

How it relates to the theme: The game uses the concept of the June Solstice (the longest day of the year) as a metaphor for freedom. The tagline is: "Survive the shortest night. Run toward the longest day." As you progress, the sky physically transitions from a terrifying midnight into the glowing sunrise of the solstice.

🎮 How to Play

You are constantly running forward. You must avoid obstacles while outrunning the enslaver patrols behind you.

Jump: Press SPACE, UP ARROW, or SWIPE UP on mobile.
Double Jump: Press jump again while in mid-air to clear large obstacles or fences.
Powerups: Collect glowing lanterns to gain a speed boost and widen the gap between you and your pursuer.
The Crossroads: When you reach a checkpoint, the game pauses. You will be presented with a historical dilemma generated live by Gemini AI. The path you choose will physically alter the weather, terrain, and obstacles in the next stage of your run!

Try it out: Free at Dawn

Code

Aayu095 / Free-At-Dawn

How I Built It

I built this game entirely from scratch using pure HTML5 Canvas and Vanilla JavaScript—zero external game engines.

The core of the game relies on Gemini 1.5 Flash acting as an AI "Dungeon Master." At every checkpoint, the game sends your progress to Gemini, which returns a structured JSON payload containing a historical dilemma and environmental variables. My custom canvas engine then parses this JSON to physically alter the game's physics, weather, and terrain (e.g., rendering grass, water, or storms) on the fly based on the AI's decisions.

Prize Category

I am submitting this game for Best Google AI Usage.

In Free at Dawn, Gemini is not just used to generate text or pre-render assets—it is the literal core engine of the game. It controls the weather, dictates the physical terrain the player must navigate, dynamically alters the physics multipliers (e.g., mud slows you down), creates the narrative tension, and generates a personalized ending. The game logic and the AI are inextricably linked. Without Google AI, the game cannot function!

"Now it's your turn. Survive the night, make the right choices, and reach the light! 🌅"

DEV Community: Aayushi Goel