Building a Game with ACF FORM

• injeju

• March 31, 2020 at 8:20 pm

To be clear I am not asking how this would be done with ACF or exactly how to pull it off any part of it I understand it is a complex concept and I’ve slowly been trying to figure it out (its a project for a visual artist), I’m just wondering if anyone could read the description below and see if ACF is even capable of achieving something like this. I understand that there is a lot of information missing here, so I’ve just tried to outline the core concept to see if I’m completely going down the wrong path trying to achieve this with acf, or if a capable ACF / JS front end dev would be able to tackle something like this – I’ve been developing with ACF for years but in a pretty traditional capacity.

Essentially I’m trying to make a game using ACF that consist of four questions that would each live on a separate page. The game could only be played by a registered user on the site, and could only be played one time. Additionally once a step of the game is played, it is locked the result is saved to the user’s profile and cannot be modified or repeated by the user (e.g. a multi-step form would not work because the user could refresh before submitting the whole thing to change an earlier step)

Outline of the game (for context it’s an online project for an exhibition that is a bit of institutional critique about the art market – so the concept is a user is “gambling” to win pieces of art, but no actual transaction is happening)

Page 1. Roll the dice (this would a button that the user would click and they would get a random value from a select field (1-6), this determines the number of ‘sculptures/works’ they are playing for (e.g. 1 work, 6 works, etc)

2. Flip a coin, same logic a single button you get a random result after clicking (heads/tails) this determines whether the price is in hundreds or thousands

3. Roll a 24 sided die same logic as step one, click a button get a number at random from 1-24 – this determines the final price they are playing for (eg. rolling a 13, with tails is 29 thousand dollars)

4. Pick Numbers (kind of a lottery ball concept) based on the result from Step one. If they, for example, rolled a 5, there would be 5 buttons on this page, that would pull at random artworks which would be the art that the user wins/is playing for. The initial idea is that the artwork would exist as a CPT (so clicking the button you would pull in a random post and save that to the users’ record) and that as the game is played when an item is selected the status would change form available to won.

Again totally thankful if anyone actually read this far, and just want to know if this type of challenge is even worth pursuing or if there are fundamental limitations here and it would be better to avoid ACF in this case.

• John Huebner

• August 23, 2022 at 8:20 pm

Other that the possibility some admin stuff for setting up the data on the artwork CPT, this is not something I’d do using ACF. I’d probably use JavaScript with AJAX to get/save steps done and values of each step in user meta since each the entire thing can only ever be done once and each step only once per user.