Fei Hua Xiao Ling / Floral Ditties

A game based on an ancient Chinese drinking game based on poetry, with added innovations.

The game is hosted on the WeChat applet platform, but I am also interested in porting it to the web.

A collaborative effort with Kuriko as our entry in the 2021 students’ WeChat applet development contest.

Fei Hua Ling (飞花令) is a game where players recite or compose poetry given a theme, which is usually a Chinese character (it was originally fixed to be “花”, “flower”; but variations exist). The verses should also adhere to metrical rules. Inspired by the Chinese Poetry Congress television programme, a set of new gameplay rules were implemented in the game, including themes of two-syllable words or verses, and pools of words.

We merged several Chinese poetry collections on the Internet and added emendations, resulting in a library of hundres of thousands of works. We curated a set of frequent words and phrases as well as well-known verses for automatic theme generation, trying our best to improve the playability of the game.

According to the analytics, the number of players was unexpectedly high. This was surprising.