Game rewards that cannot be faked, for a children’s learning app

The problem

Rewards were written from the player’s own browser. That made them trivial to forge, and made the whole balance meaningless - a problem that grows the moment rewards unlock anything real.

Each game scores differently: a chess result, a sudoku time, a crossword’s accuracy. One flat rate would be either stingy or exploitable.

What we did

• The browser reports what happened in a game; the server decides what it is worth. Awards have deterministic ids, so replaying the same result cannot pay twice.
• Ten formula types - flat, result, margin, time, accuracy, attempts and others - with parameters set per game in the admin console, plus daily caps per game and across the platform.
• The formula code is shared between the browser and the server, copied at build time, so a guest’s preview and a member’s real award are the same arithmetic.
• Guests see what they would have earned and are invited to sign up; only members are paid.

The result

Rewards across every Shravya app are now configured in one place and granted only by the server, with an audit trail of who changed what.

Game designers adjust how generous a game is from the console, without a code change or a deploy.