Bitcoin mining made fun with an adventure themed web game driven by an eager online community
Gaming
Web-based game
Co-Founder
Lead Art Designer
Game User Experience
Founded by a small team of designers, developers, and cryptocurrency/ blockchain enthusiasts who share a passion for building enjoyable products for people, Febbit has transformed from a faucet game into an interactive web game for more than 166,000 active users. Through the process my role evolved to accommodate the growing demand of new features, which can be summarized below:
Building Febbit’s gameplay assets from characters, badges, items, to scenes
Designing features to gamify the user experience
Elevating the gameplay mechanics and interactions through playful animations
Engaging with the Febbit community and growing the userbase
The journey began in 2018, when a group of four mutual friends started a conversation about a project one of them was working on. With our unique skillsets and backgrounds, we realized an opportunity to build something exceptional. With our combined efforts, we bootstrapped a functioning web game, having some fun in the process.
From insights collected through Google Analytics, the top regions of our user base were located in North America, South America, and Asia. To determine whether our business model was sustainable, we worked with a consulting group to get a better idea of our trajectory within our current and target markets.
Before characters, there were chips used as indicators of gameplay progression. These chips were acquired by opening caches which were gained through mining on the mining page. At first, this process was represented by numbers changing in value over time but as we introduced characters, we began to integrate them into the game interactions.
Febbit uses idle gameplay mechanics—a type of user experience dedicated towards minimalistic user interaction and prolonged intermittent play. One of the core gameplay features requires the user to interact with only three buttons, which can all be found within the miner page.
The vision for Febbit evolved as we began to see the potential and push from the community to keep adding new features. At first we introduced chips as a visual token of the gamer stats, then expanded into characters and icons. We went from basic gamification elements such as collecting items, powering up, and randomly generated surprises, to more advanced game elements such as new missions, and a storyline.
These are key user motivations we considered through development:
Horizontal and vertical menus are common design patterns used in websites for quick and easy navigation. We tried to move away from this style and instead opt for a map-like menu to encourage exploration and adventure. As a result, we could create a narrative around the characters and core game functionality.
The cache page allows users to collect “caches”which can contain valuable “chips” which are essential in the users’ gameplay progression. Clicking any of the cache icons will allow the user to open the cache by clicking the “Open Cache” prompt, revealing a chip inside.
Within the inventory page, the user is able to manage the different kind of chips that they have collected and can use the acquired chips to improve their character. Clicking on a chip will prompt a tool-tip from which the user can perform different functions such as: levelling the chip, using resources, equipping the chip in the installed slot, fusing the chip, or selling the chip.
