Flaggle

main menu screen
guessing screen
victory screen

Geography Obsession

I was never really interested in geography and flags in the first place. I used to think it was a nerdy thing that only weird people would do in their free time. However, that all changed when in the sixth grade, I was asked by one of my friends if I'd help them learn some country flags. Upon being exposed to the field of geography for the first time, I've been obsessed ever since. I liked looking at the different flags of countries, especially their uniqueness and significance that they hold on the country. From then on, I've learned every country, capital, flag, population, almost everything that built my status as the "geogeek".

A Concept

Not many people have a good knowledge of the world they live in, especially Americans. For this hackathon, I wanted to make a flag-based game for people to test their knowledge on flags and be able to identify one in minimal guesses. I thought about having a country's flag being covered with 16-ish black squares, and each guess that the player takes would result in a square being removed. My game, Flaggle, seemed like a good idea on paper, I knew that people wouldn't want to play this as an everyday thing. That's when I became inspired by one of the most popular games currently, Wordle, a word game that keeps players coming back to play by making it be a daily system. Because of Wordle's daily system attracting players, I decided to have the players that play my game feel that they have to come back to it every day, thus resulting in them learning more about flags. I felt that my cycle worked perfectly, so I was ready to develop.

Development

I was already a Roblox developer many years prior to the hackathon, so it wasn't hard getting the basics of it done. It was all going good until I realized that I had to download and insert all 197 flags of every country in the world into my game. Although it took well over two hours just for inserting the files, everything else was a breeze. I made scripts that would detect when a day started, and then it would tell the game to make a new Flaggle in exactly a day in order for the daily mechanism to work. Once I was done developing, I felt that I've created a useful game for people to learn and test their knowledge on flags around the world.

The Future of Flaggle

Now that I think about it, this isn't all that I want to have Flaggle to be. In the upcoming months of Flaggle, I'm planning on implementing more geography game modes to make my game have more diversity other than just being a flag game. I might even advertise the game to have its popularity to grow.

What I've Learned

Without me giving into a previously thought "nerdy" topic, I would've never came up with the idea of Flaggle. This could've happened way more times in my life than it shouldn't have, and what holds us back from embracing the things we love, is society's opinions. We fear that we're going to get bullied for enjoying a topic that's "weird" or "nerdy", but that passion could be the start of something much, much bigger.