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My goal for our first game — and all of them — is to make a fun, hypnotic place to rest your mind and your eyes for a bit while you wait for life to catch up to you. It’s for this reason that I’m not big on timers or meta-scoring (as in keeping track of your scores for each game). Life is busy, sometimes stressful. And for me, at least, I can’t add anymore stress. Just fun.

One of the ways that I hope will instill a bit of fun to our puzzle game is in the winning. When you win a game — even the easy one-move first tutorial game — you get a little cascade of icons and a cute sound (if you have sounds turned on — we give you the option). But in working with the game, I found that I really wanted to change what got dropped in the winning cascade.

I think of it like I do my home decor — I like to change up the sofa pillows, curtains, shower curtain, etc. with the seasons. When we were first married, I think Eric thought I was off my meds. But now, I think he likes it. He always knows which season we are in by the color of the bedcover.

So seeing as how it’s just about Thanksgiving time here in America, I’m cascading Turkeys and pumpkins to our band of alpha testers:

The turkeys and pumpkins are specified in Firebase remote config, so that’s what Americans see when they win — pumpkins and turkeys. If you are one of our Australian players, you will get spring leaves — thanks to Firebase’s conditional parameters. And then after Thanksgiving, I will set it to be little Christmas trees and Santas (or something like that). This concept expands as we expand our reach into other countries and languages:

It does mean that I will have to keep up with holidays and traditions for each locale we serve — but that’s part of the fun! I’m sooooo looking forward to cascading swans for our British players on Swan Upping day.

As you can see by the URL, we serve up our images via Firebase hosting. It’s super easy to set up, and we don’t have to worry about whether we have space and bandwidth on our puzzlemonster.com server. This was the first time I set up a spot in Firebase hosting and it went swimmingly.

So there you have it — another way we use Firebase for customizing what our players see. Are you using Firebase in a novel way? Drop a comment and let me know how much fun you are having with it!

By the way, if you like the icons we are using, thank our pals over at Icons8.com — awesome icons!

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Developer, gardener, animal lover. Wife of a puzzlemonster. My coding resume shows my age: Wordperfect reveal codes => HTML => ASP Classic => SQL => JavaScript => jQuery => PHP => WordPress under-the-hood => Java => Android dev.