#game developmen

Made this Hellhound on stream the other day!

Hello! I’m designing a game built around morally ambiguous scenarios with the question being asked, who are you in the face of death? Can you make a decision and live with it? The goal is to create emotionally resonant encounters that challenge players to empathize with NPCs and allow players to reflect on their choices. I want to give players a space to slow down, think about the consequences, and see themselves in the mirror, both the good and the bad.

To do this, I created the Modular Emotional Encounter Framework (MEEF). It’s a playtesting method for building short, intense moral dilemmas. It's effectively a series of playable thought experiments. The game itself is structured around trolley problems and prisoner’s dilemmas, where players must act or not act based on incomplete information. Suppose the player does act, whatever the characters say, the player must make their own judgement about a character and likewise the character is its own independent moral agent that needs to decide to either cooperate or fight against you.

Games like Missile Command and Oregon Trail show how game mechanics can support the narrative. The most efficient strategy in both is to let everyone except one die off which is horrifying if you stop and think about it. The Last of Us Part II tried to provoke empathy in Abby but struggled when it forced players into actions that contradicted their own intentions. I believe giving players space to choose or reflect on their choices will creates stronger emotional impact than forcing a message.

School as been chaotic. We have a playtesting session tomorrow and I can't seem to have everything ready(at least everything I deem needed or useful to collect data from a playtesting session with the rest of the class), although to be honest I don't expect much.

My last playtesting sessing for Project With Hunt went pretty badly. Half the group I was put in skipped class, so I only had 3 people test out my game and one of them filled out my form with mostly one-word answers (really useful there buddy)... But I was confident for that one, since it was an individual project.

Now? I’m in a 5 people group, and i feel like I’m not working enough, and that all the code I push out to show sucks. Maybe it’s just my existential crisis but I feel like I should have worked more in the code and probably added more of the mechanics we want for the final project. I’m only missing two really, but one of them is the core of the game and I’m not even sure I can finish it in time. I’m hoping for the best.

In the meantime, here's a picture of our prototyped scenery

The name of a room is passed to roomMgr, and set in the Create() method.

You need to create the room first, and then pass it to Initialize()

Initialize() cannot take a table as a parameter

serv-ex-retry has an additional try/catch block around the network handler loop, so when the client asks for a region the server doesn't automatically crash.

I've removed the weird reference characters from the lambda declarations (don't ask).

Tutorial: HTML5 Games with LimeJS

It’s been a fantastic couple of years for HTML5 games, for both consumers and developers. In fact, HTML5 is turning into a great game development platform, rapidly catching up to the ubiquity of Flash-based browser gaming. Are you a game enthusiast who wants to turn game ideas into reality? This tutorial will provide a comprehensive view over how to build a browser game with LimeJS. However, a…