Credits
Music: Luke Highet [email protected]
Programmer art: (and everything else – with a lot of help from Google) Carl Bateman [email protected]
Press “Esc” at any time to quit and return to this screen.
Press “M” To toggle music on / off.
About
This game was developed in 10 hours using Google Chrome, HTML5 and the Cloud 9 online dev suite as part of the 10th Aug 2013 GameCraft Game Jam at SkillsMatter (the Pizza was excellent and the travel was civilised). The given theme was “The Impact of Prism”. Initial design was done as part of a group (who went on to win) but I split off to work solo — damn my independent spirit. A background track was provided by Luke Highet.
The original idea was to visualise surveillance data for terror suspects (i.e. anyone with a pulse) and the potential links between them.
The status of individuals was to be represented by colour and shape:
black – detain immediately,
red – high alert,
orange – indeterminate,
green – “safe”
square: known / confirmed terrorists.
circle: true patriot… probably. Best keep an eye on ’em, just in case.
triangle: potential whistle-blowers / politically connected – treat with caution (i.e. avoid).
Due to the high number of potential connections between subjects graphing the network seemed likely to be too messy and too difficult to organise clearly in the time allocated, I was down to the last couple of hours at this point so it became a scramble to finish up and get a playable game. Which lead to a much simplifed…
Game mechanic
Analyse, categorise and finalise action to be taken (if any) against surveillance targets.
That is, just drag and drop subjects into the appropriate “bin”, to be held indefinitely without trial or freed.
A sense of urgency was added by adding a 30 second time limit to place undue pressure on the player.
Scoring
Unconfirmed terrorists 0 Gitmo, 1 liberty
Confirmed terrorists 1 Gitmo, 0 liberty
Whistle blowers (are ignored – which part of “avoid” didn’t you understand)
NB The state never makes mistakes.
Comments
The code is a bit messy (it was a game jam after all) although I’ve had to “tidy” some of the code to get it to work with WordPress (always fun).
As for realising the theme; play a round and see the outcome (another reason for the 30 second time limit, to get to the punchline all the quicker).
The GameObj and InputHandler are derived from code from the Udacity HTML5 Game Programming course, two of the few worthwhile things to come of it.
There seems to be a bug or something affecting music playback. Despite looping the track and trying an accepted workround there is still a noticable pause when the track repeats.