This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition
What I Built
I built BoonFest: a web game designed to awaken your inner generosity.
Most games reward you for conquest, killing, speeding, hoarding, stacking power, and looking out only for yourself. In BoonFest, that exact mindset is a death sentence. Here, to survive, you'll have to be generous, productive, and mindful.
Most games are designed to be addictive—promoting endless sloth. BoonFest is built to create balance between healthy entertainment and your real life, with built-in playtime restrictions.
Demo
Code
SweaDev
/
BoonFestDemo
BoonFest Demo
BoonFest
An anti-sloth, pro-social web game balancing capital accumulation, self-cultivation, and societal welfare through generative altruism.
🌟 Overview
BoonFest challenges players to resist deceptive short-cuts and predatory economic traps while navigating the delicate tri-fold balance between personal capital, self-mastery, and civic altruism.
As you navigate real-time economic turns, entropy steadily degrades your societal environment—visualized dynamically by your world's Ecosystem Hue (shifting from verdant green towards catastrophic crimson red). Only by cultivating your core attributes and funneling personal wealth into pro-social Boon projects can you stabilize the world, conquer entropy, and achieve enduring legacy.
🎮 Gameplay Details & Mechanics
1. The Three Pillars of Self-Cultivation
Your attributes dictate your capacity for honest productivity, physical resilience, and altruistic impact:
| Pillar | Symbol | Primary Function | Strategic Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mind | 🧠 | Labor Efficiency | Multiplies net Credit yields from honest Earn cards. Higher Mind unlocks high-tier intellectual and architectural contracts. |
| Body | ⚡ | Entropy Dampening | Bolsters physical and |
A Little Background
This Weekend Challenge is specifically interesting for me!
DEV did something unique for this one: @heyitsjem, on behalf of The DEV Team, asked the DEV community what the next Weekend Challenge theme should be.
Some cool suggestions came up from the community, but to my pleasant surprise, DEV decided to run with generosity, which was inspired by my own world peace suggestion!
Since the theme this time was inspired by my suggestion, I thought I must participate in this one, as an appreciation for The DEV Team's kind consideration! 🙏🏼
Initially I wanted to develop a donation organization finding web app for this Challenge, but @sizzlebop beat me to it with her Sprinkle Project.
Well, this is generosity challenge, so I'm just grateful that someone already did what I wanted to do! 🥰
How I Built It
As I've already mentioned, the idea generation took too long. So I didn't have enough time to manually develop the game. I had multiple options to develop the game using AI. I chose AI Studio.
I've used AI Studio before, but only for checking out, never for a complete app with deployment. So, I thought, why don't I try it out and see how it goes!
Turned out, it was an excellent decision. Without AI Studio, I wouldn't be able to complete this demo.
Suffice it to say, with my existing Google AI subscription ($19.99/mo), I ran out of my daily limit fast. I had to use some prepaid Gemini API Credits. But I'm glad I could complete the demo in less than $10 API expense. Thanks goes to the Google AI Team! 🥰
The Game Idea
Almost immediately after replying to @sizzlebop's comment, I thought, hey, why don't I develop a generosity game, where giving means winning!
That idea stuck to my brain, but forming the actual game logic where generosity wins, proved to be more difficult than I initially thought. That's normal though, most games we play these days translates taking to winning, not the other way round. On the other hand, endlessly giving without an "End Game" is not really fun!
So, I had to take the healthier alternative to taking, which is apparently not fun, and make generosity interesting in game play.
I accepted my inner challenge, and started brainstorming with literally pen and paper.
So, yeah, the entire game logic is 100% original. This demo is only a partial implementation, as the idea generation phase took too long to actually implement the entire game within this short challenge window.
Naming BoonFest
As I was working with the game play logic, multiple name idea came to my mind. BoonFest was one of the first few names, but I didn't really expect the .com version of the domain name to be available. So I was really glad to be able to secure BoonFest.com for the future of the game!
Game Development with AI Studio
After the idea generation, I used AI Studio for game development and Publishing.
My development experience with AI Studio was surprisingly good. The whole process from start to publish was very smooth.
I've implemented Gemini API to generate some in-game content, and with AI Studio it was just a single prompt and then securely adding my Gemini API Key from the Settings panel.
All the in game AI content can be changed from Admin panel, so it's not a simple AI generation implementation. AI Studio did it without any issues at all.
Prize Categories
Along with contesting for the overall challenge winner, I'm also applying for the Best Use of Google AI prize category.
Hope you'll like this brand new game.
Please stay tuned for future updates once the Challenge judges finalize their decisions.
Stay blessed! 😇
Top comments (25)
Additional Notes for Judges:
AI Usage Disclaimer:
Demo Users:
Admin:
Can I use the demo users to play? 😋
LOL. Better if you don't. 😆
Pls. send me an email to: me [at] fayaz [dot] dev
I'll create an account for you 😊
Cool concept! It's like Fable, trying to max out the Niceness 😂 except, no shortcut killing evil things... Just purely being helpful.
Something I had thought about, was making a troll page (in a way), just a social experiment, a basic web page, with a donate button, you click it, it gives you amounts to donate, you click donate and it just gives you a kind message. Closing the page though, shows a blocking popup, "not very generous are we?", then a different message if they cancel it and click donate and do the process. No payment linkage at all, just a pure social experiment. But thought against it, I dont think alot of people would click a link...
A better experiment would be to randomly give and take money on a donate page.
e.g. people will connect their PayPal, select an amount and click pay - sometimes the system will deduct the amount from their PayPal and other times the system will pay the same amount to their PayPal instead!
Let it lose and see how some people becomes crazy clicking when they realize that sometimes it pays back 🤣
🤣 and instead of tracking 'money donated', 'money received', just say 'money redistributed' 😂 and that tracks money people send and receive, so after the first pay-out, it's just pay-in, that way the greedy people just lose their gains, whereas those who choose to be generous get a happy surprise and the ability to still give if they choose.
1 problem, my country doesnt support paypal, so wont quite work... But feel free to run with it and see how many people do it 🤣 Afterwards, you can create a post where you donate token subscriptions or something from all the proceeds? In the end the greed became generosity 😇
PayPal would probably block the transactions at some point 🤣
Perhaps it's a better fit for some cheap but still valuable crypto.
Too many moving parts though, people are unlikely to set up crypto accounts, fund it, just to donate? But if you set up stripe, it'd work?
LOL, are we making another game in the comment section of DEV? 😂
BoonFest does more though - you need to earn to pay, you need to grow (in mind, body and spirit) to get paid more, and you're penalized for being greedy.
It's not like you can simply keep donating out of thin air 😊
Well yes, that's the point of generosity. Whose more generous? A beggar who gives you their last dollar, or a billionaire giving you 10? What did they give up to help.
Wild that your own "world peace" suggestion became the actual theme, that's a cool full circle moment. Respect for going pen-and-paper on the generosity-as-survival game logic before touching AI Studio. good luck
Thanks 🥰
I could barely submit 😬
Thank you so much for mentioning Sprinkle! Boonfest is such a fun take on the challenge, and making generosity the thing that keeps you alive is really clever. I’m glad my little project could be part of the inspiration. I can’t wait to see where you take it! ❤️
You're most welcome! 🥰
This is a great project. All the best!!
Also, glad to see you still here, and you've built so many amazing projects and have been so consistent.
All the best
Thank you so much!
All the best to you too 🥰
Thank you 😊
How does BoonFest redefine collaboration mechanics in gaming 🥸
May be it doesn't completely redefine it, but it does so differently mainly conceptually.
Instead of counting game points based on credits (money) or growth, it counts game points based on generosity, or boon points.
I think if I implement the multiplayer mode, it'll become more obvious.
Thanks for your replay! :-)
Nice! 🤩
Please post about your final idea with this one.
I'm very much interested.
This is really a cool idea! 🤩
Just played my first 5 minutes as Guest user. Loved it.
Please keep developing. Can't wait to play the full release!
Thanks! 🥰