Timeframe: 06/2019 – 05/2020
Position: Gameplay Engineer (contract)
Technologies: JavaScript, Phaser, HTML, CSS, Photon Engine, NodeJS, Unity (design prototype)
Status: No longer active. Awarded 3rd place in Digital Games at ECGBL 2020.
The Story:
Little Fish Lagoon was designed to help teach lessons around “The Tragedy of the Commons”, by modelling ecological collapse. Up to three players can chat with each other online as they run three separate fishing companies, fishing and selling their catches. Once sold, they can then purchase upgrades and try to out-fish their peers. The problem with trying to “win” is that it very quickly leads to collapsing the ecosystem, encouraging players to work together to sustainably fish and last through the limited rounds of the game.
This project used Phaser, as Unity’s Web Player was too large of a download to work with entire classrooms downloading the player at the same time during class to play the game. It also used Photon Engine for cloud-based networking, and players could be matched up in lobbies by entering class-codes given by the teachers. Teams of three would play through, chatting while telemetry was collected to research conversation during management of teamwork-dependent problems. The successful collection of this data would fuel subsequent projects such as Libra Text and Libra Audio.
Some of the menus were HTML to take advantage of native controls not present in Phaser, and encapsulated in DOMElements, though the majority of logic was written in Phaser, and despite the web version being smaller than Unity Web Player builds, the design prototype was delivered in Unity. Later on, Photon Engine was removed and a version utilizing a dedicated NodeJS server was created.
