Compete in an animated GIF chat battle—as ridiculous as it sounds.

What if you could only talk in GIFs? We built a GIF-based chat battle game as a Postlight Labs project. It features Twitter authentication, chess-clock gameplay, keyword image searching, and lots and lots of GIFs. GIF Battle was fun to make, and fun to play.

Memes only

One day we asked ourselves, “What if we could remove all the parts of chat that aren’t GIFs?” Then we thought, “What if we gamified that?” And GIFBattle was born.

For fun only

GIFBattle was a side project for the Postlight team. We knew that enforcing code quality without a code overlord would be difficult, so we used ESLint and Stylelint. We also use React which allowed us to experiment and play until we found something we wanted to keep. For example, when we pivoted from a global, always running timer to a per-player chess timer, we were able to keep almost all of the logic we’d already written. Retaining our existing code was possible due to component isolation and higher order components.

Teens love it

Being serious about our tools let us have a lot of silly fun really fast—and a great launch party, and the chance to talk with lots of users. It was a terrific project for us in our earliest days, as we were learning what kind of company we wanted to be. Oddly (or not), teens love GIFBattle. And since it was one of the first projects that Postlight did just for ourselves, we love GIFBattle too.