Timeframe: 10/2018 – 03/2019
Position: Gameplay Engineer (contract)
Technologies: JavaScript, Phaser, HTML, CSS, Photon Engine, AWS S3
Status: Deployed to classrooms for research purposes.
The Story:
The success of Crisis in Space brought in some contracts to do variants of the game for a Google grant, and a different version for ACT. Both of these relied on a set of common features and upgrades that were dubbed Crisis in Space 2. New puzzles, changes to make the mission sets more extensible (and editable by the organizations requesting them), and updated graphics, made all of this possible.
Phaser was used for the game, while Photon Engine handled the networking via cloud services and storage of game state within the game room data objects. Without a server, the first client to connect was made the “authoritative client” and handled game state. Should that client drop and reconnect, the other client takes over and manages the game. The use of class-codes helped segment the lobbies so that students played only with students in their class, and match-making took the number of games students played with each other into account.
The system worked very well, and was improved upon for the next game, Little Fish Lagoon.
