In Catalonia (Spain), Saint Gerorge's day is one of the most original celebrations, book and flower stalls are set up along the streets of Barcelona 🌹📚
So I created a gamechat that explains the Saint George's story from the point of view of one the characters (🐮👸🏼🤴👑👨🌾🐲), in order to advance the users have to interact with other participants and find the next character that unlock his story.
Let's see an example:
(Note that all the texts are in Catalan)
As you can see, to start the history you must start a conversation with the bot and text the keyword: conte.
Then, the bot explain the introduction of the story and assigns you a character (in this case the princess 👸🏼). To continue, the user need to find another participant with the king 👑 character and attach the contact:
Finally, to end the story, the princess must find the dragon 🐲
- 27.375 users started at least one story
- 133.707 messages and contacts processed by the chatbot during the event
- 2797 users complete the story as the cow 🐮
- 3571 users complete the story as the 👸🏼
- 3196 users complete the story as the knight 🤴
- 3281 users complete the story as the king 👑
- 2918 users complete the story as the farmer 👨🌾
- 2067 users complete the story as the dragon 🐲
I developed the Whatsapp bot using the following elements:
- A laptop with this Python Whatsapp Web wrapper
- A mobile phone with Whatsapp installed (and a secondary telephone line)
- A MySQL database using Docker
I noticed several scalability problems when handling requests from more than 10k users. The first hours the new users income where 2/hour (basically my family and friends), then it started growing exponentially until 1000 new users per hour.
At this point the system collapsed and the response time raised to 5 minutes in some cases, that delay stopped the exponentially growing curve :(
I would like to thank my family and friends who trusted in my idea and forward the Whatsapp bot contact.