WhatIsAGame.net

title
vote scene
story scene
vote complete
tictactoe scene

Inspiration

Throughout my game dev journey, I came across many books, videos, essays, and thesis on the more academic study of video games. It was half out of pure interest and half in hopes that it would let me make better games. One of the books was Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois, a renowned ludologist.

His definition of games interested me. Not only was "what" the activity of a game a concern, but the intention of the players and the context of the game were too. It was a fascinating read. After, I looked up other attempts at defining a game. Some very strict, some very broad. The conclusion I came to was that everybody has their own definition, and everybody's definition isn't probably concrete either. I was inspired by the personal nature of the definition of a "game" to make this game.

What it does

The game is intended to help the player find out what their definition of a game is. WhatIsAGame.net is a fully narrated interactive game where you play through a series of familiar games. The games will be modified to push your definition of what a game is and ask YOU if you think it's still a game. Answering the question enters you into a poll, and shows you how many previous players agree with your answer. At the end of the game, the player's answers are complied into showing the player's definition of what a game is.

How we built it

The game itself was built using Phaser 3 and Typescript. I used AWS amplify to host it on the web and s3 bucket to store the vote polling table. The narration was done my me on a Blue Yeti microphone and edited with audacity. Many public assets were used in addition to my own graphic assets. For the assets I made myself, I used clip studio to draw.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the biggest challenges I ran into were learning the new techs. I never worked with Phaser, Typescript, or AWS before. So, there were a lot of learning curves and setting up I had to do. On top of that, life happened. And, it happened to chunk out 70% of the time I allocated for the project in one swing, and I got food poisoning while on the other 30%

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The part I'm the most proud of is that I finished the project. Of course, with the time cut, there are a lot of things I planned and wish I could do. But, pulling this many all-day work days is really giving me the confidence to work on longer projects again. Also, I'm proud of how many new things I tried (and successfully so). I doubted myself on if I could learn a new language, a new engine, and a new platform individually, but it was a real thrill to have pulled it all off.

What we learned

(On top of the new tech)

When doing repetitive tasks, batching the same task is a lot less taxing than context switching for each chunk
Always have a backup plan for something not working (tech-wise or budget-wise)
Count how many days you have left till the deadline more often
Don't eat oysters during important competitions

What's next for WhatIsAGame.net

I want to say it's on its way to win some artsy game award or festival. But clearly it won't in it's current state. After seeing it all day for too many days, I want to take a vacation from it for a bit. But may it await the day it becomes what I fully envisioned