While messaging platforms have made chatbots ubiquituous, there are a very low number of handy bots that you access everyday. Secure chat service Telegram wants to encash on the same by making bots fun, competitive and addictive. The company is, thus, taking the messaging experience a step further with the launch of its first-ever bot-powered gaming platform.
While text-based games had already been a part of the messaging client, Telegram is now taking the WeChat or Allo route by building in small byte-sized games that can be played right inside the chat window. This will now allows developers to use a newly launched API to make use of HTML 5 graphics and sounds to make their games more visually appealing.
Today we are aiming to push the boundaries further by launching a bot-powered Gaming Platform on Telegram. That’s right: you can now use bots to play games in your chats, complete with graphics and sound,
reads the official blogpost.
All these games are basically kbs worth of webpages and won’t add to your internal storage. Though Telegram believes that developers will soon unleash their creativity and completely flood the gaming platform, it has started out small with a set of about 30 games. These games have been developed by gamee and can be accessed by interacting with their bot directly. But, isn’t that cumbersome? And how is this fun and interactive?
Well, Telegram is not limiting the bot-powered games to just that particular chat and giving you freedom to invoke it from any of your chats in the app. Very much like invoking the Google Assistant in Allo, you can start by typing @gamebot in a group chat to access the variety of games. You can then play the game, reach a certain score and then challenge your friends to go up against you.
Telegram also says that it will keep track of high scores both within a group and globally. And when anyone on the group breaks a high score, all participants of the group will be alerted of the change. They can then jump in on the conversation and try to beat the new score.
Developers can now build Telegram games ranging from simple arcades and puzzles to multiplayer 3D-shooters and strategy games. The update with the gaming platform is now live on both Android and iOS. So go ahead and get your game on!
