Overview
Client needed an interactive and mobile friendly mathematical puzzle application designed and integrated into their WordPress site.
To foster engagement and monetize the app, the client asked for a scoreboard system, and a puzzle creation system, and an automatic puzzle solver.
Originally the puzzle system was built into ekswhy.com, but was later migrated to game-space.org
Solution
We chose to build the app using P5.js and created a custom plugin to integrate it into the WordPress site.
Different membership levels were created which unlocked separate features of the app like access to the scoring system and the puzzle creator.
The puzzle solving system was particularly challenging as we discovered that it took an immense amount of computing power due to the mathematical nature of the puzzles, even after optimizing the algorithm as much as possible.
We recommended to offload the puzzle solving computation to the cloud so that it found solutions to the puzzle asynchronously and then delivered the solutions to the site user once the computation completed, which could take hours in some circumstances.
Implementation Details
Memberpress was used to facilitate the membership levels
Custom post types were used to facilitate the storage puzzles and scoring system
P5.js was used for the puzzle player and creator, and the puzzle solver leveraged JavaScript Web Workers, and later an integration with Google Cloud to offload the processing since it required so much CPU power to solve the puzzles
We built the following features:
- Interactive mathematical puzzle which can have multiple solutions
- Algorithmically check if one of the solutions has been found
- Interactive timer which records how long it took to solve the puzzle
- Ability to save scores based on time spend solving the puzzle
- Competitive scoreboard listing scores of all members utilizing WordPress API
- Generated member usernames to obfuscate identity of members
- Securely limited access to sensitive member info since WordPress API in use
- Member-specific score history
- Graph of member score history for each puzzle type
- Puzzle composer with different levels of access based on membership level, allowing members to create their own puzzles. This was also built to be mobile adaptive
Technology Overview
- WordPress
- Javascript
- P5.js
- Web Workers
- Memberpress
- Advanced Custom Fields
- Custom Post Types
- Custom HTML/CSS/PHP
- Google Cloud
- MySQL
