- Group 15's project for CMPT276
- Members: Alexander, Tyrell, Thu, Aleksandar, Darren
Web app link: https://shielded-everglades-90801.herokuapp.com/
Git link for web app: https://github.com/thudinh91/cmpt276_team15
Git link for game: https://github.com/aleksvranjes/Bender
Admin username: admin
Admin password: AdminP@ssw0rd
The game, “Geomancer”, is a web application game. The game will be a 2 dimensional twin stick shooter, and while it is meant to be played on a computer, it will also support APIs for plugging in an old video game controller to use and play with and facebook APIs to share stats with friends (and encourage them to join). In the game itself, the player entity will be able to move around on a 2d map using elemental projectiles to combat different types of enemies - each with unique resistances and weaknesses. Live multiplayer co-operative modes will be allowed. By playing more and winning achievements, players will collect points. They will be able to use the in-game currency to purchase additional abilities, upgrades, and gear. The game, will be fun to play in short rounds, or marathons, with friends, or alone. Collecting and purchasing different items will also be a core feature of the game that encourages players to keep playing. Player accounts will track their purchases (upgrades, abilities, gear), their top scores, leaderboards, statistics, achievements, and friends list.
The primary customer will be casual gamers looking for a quick but engaging game with low time commitment. Appealing to casual gamers with a simple gameplay style on the surface, the game will present challenges and difficulty to appeal to a wider range of gamers and present a mix of short and long term rewards (with an amount of randomness for addictive value).
Our competitors are all small to medium game studios that have an established presence in the market. Any games with similar characteristics of our games such as: ease to target mass market, highly addictive and engaging value and perfect time-killers can be competitive products to ours. Geometry Wars is the inspiration of our product that closely resembles our structure. Geometry Wars has high-quality graphic designs, as well as many levels from easy to difficult that motivate players to come back and challenge themselves. There are many other mobile apps and web apps that integrate Geometry War’s ideas, but they rarely enable multiplayers or present comparable sophisticated model. Thus, we attempt to address these current drawbacks with different strategies.
Our game is web app; therefore, it is freely available to anyone who has access to Internet. The statistics published by Big Fish Game shows that in 2017, 54% of gamers play with others. Multiplayer cooperative mode is integrated that allow up to four players to fight together at the same time. Adding to that, more complex enemy and combat system are constructed. The enemies and weapons may be divided into different groups that have greater or less resistance toward each others. If time permits, we can incorporate multiple levels with different themes that add more variety to the game.
We believe that the above strategies will make our web game competitive. The global games market is projected with healthy growth of 6.2% in the period from 2016 to 2020 (newzoo, 2017). In this scope of our project, we will focus on building a web app game. However, with the possibility of moving to mobile platform, this app has huge potential to catch up with the mobile trend in the future.
Jacky has been really stressed out about his upcoming midterm tomorrow, he’s been studying for 5 straight hours and is ready to take a break. With feelings of self-doubt creeping in, he wants to do something fun without shutting down his brain. He decides to start up Geomancer his new favourite game. Jacky presses “Play Now” and the game fires up its vicious AI scripts as it sends waves of varied enemies hurdling at him. As Jacky takes the final killing blow to his character he’s presented with a screen that tells him he’s reached a new highscore, propelling him to 6th on the leaderboards! He’s also finally earned the “Reach 1,000,000 Points in a Single Game Achievement” that he’s been striving to achieve for oh so long. This rush of dopamine and adrenaline was exactly the boost he needed to reinvigorate his confidence heading into another 3 hours of studying. With the share to Facebook button, we as developers will get closure in knowing we’ve helped out a fellow student when we see the facebook post from Jacky about his new highscore and pumped of confidence heading into the exam tomorrow.
John is the administrator of Geomancer. Regularly, he logins and checks his chatbox messages from other regular users addressing any issues they may have. For example, users’ information is not record accurately. As an administrator, he can access to individual account to manually review and update user information such as status, scores, assets, achievements, etc. Sometimes, he needs to resolve conflicts between users. For examples, some users may use offensive language while communicating with other users. John then can review the chatbox transcripts and decide if he should ban users by removing their account. If there is a bug that causes uneven score distribution when players play in multiplayer mode, John can cross-check to the database to resolve any inconsistent issues. Occasionally, John can put the games into maintenance mode if there are any updates or bug fixing needed to be done.
Description: Signup and login for regular user Actor/Personas: regular user Chris Preconditions/Triggers: Chris want to play the game but when go to the page, it prompt him to sign in page before he can play the game. Since he doesn’t have account, he signup first. Postconditions: When signup, Chris need to provide username, name, password, password confirmation and email. If username or email is already existed, it will redirect back to signup page with corresponding error message. If the password and password confirmation are not matched, an error message will be display as well.
After signup, Chris will be redirected to login page. If Chris typed in incorrect email/username or password, it will redirect to Login page with corresponding error message. Once login success, it should be redirected to games home page according to our interface design in the proposal.
When Chris login, he/she can only view his/her profile and cannot go to other users’ profiles by modifying the URL.
When Chris logout, he will be redirected to login page.
Description: Admin profile page is different from regular users Actor/personas: John is admin of the web app Precondition/Trigger: John need to login just like other users to play game and perform admin task Postconditions/Actions: When admin users login, he should be redirected to admin profile that has different view from regular user. He has access to all user lists by clicking on the “index” link.
NOTE: There is one admin in which is manually set in the database for the demo. The admin username is: ‘admin’ and password is: ‘AdminP@ssw0rd’.
Description: Update user information Actors/personas: regular user (Steve) Precondition and Triggers: Steve recognizes that it has been 1 year since she graduated from university and his school email will soon be revoked. Steve want to update his profile with different email address. Actions/ Postcondition: Steve goes to the web app and choose “Settings". He updates his account with the new email address
Description: Assign a user as an admin Actors/personas: John is the administrator Precondition/ Triggers: John cannot perform administrative role in a period. He want to set someone else as admin. Actions/ Postconditions: After logging in, John can see the list of all users by clicking on “Index". John finds Steve among the users and see that she is not an admin yet. John then click on “Edit” and set Steve as user then choose “update user". After that, John is redirected back to User index page and see that his change is successfully saved.
Description: Single player game play Actor/personas: Bob is a student and regular user Precondition/ Triggers: Swamped student Bob is looking to unwind for a bit Action/ Postconditions: Bob loads the game in webpage, and decides to play a single player game. He can choose one of 5 elements to use to defeat waves of enemies. Every element is strong against one of the other elements, i.e. water beats fire. Bob can: -start the game by pressing the spacebar -play again when he loses by pressing the R key -move around with WASD -move the mouse around to aim at enemies -shoot projectiles at enemies to kill them with the left mouse button -Use the F key, 1 2 3 4 5 keys, or mouse scroll wheel to cycle through elemental projectiles Bob cannot: -leave the boundaries of the level otherwise he will lose -continue his current game after getting hit four times; his score will be reset upon playing again After playing the game for a bit, Bob has reached a new high score and is satisfied with his relaxation time going into this game. (The animations are not all complete for this iteration)
###Iteration 3: Description: Login/logout with Google API Actor/persona: Wilson is a potential user without account created. Precondition/trigger: Wilson want to try the game after hearing about it from his game. However, he finds that creating an account before actually playing game is burdensome. Postcondition: Wilson go to the web app and finds that he can use Google account to log in. He clicks the sign in with Google logo button and sign in with his Google account. After that, he is redirected to the menu page, clicks play game and can play the game. After finishing the game, Wilson go back to main menu and click logout. He then logout from our web app without logging out his Google account. Velocity discussion: At first, research has been done for Facebook API as proposed but then it is found that Google API may be simpler to implement. The user story was assigned 2 points (each point is approximately 4 hours working), with 1 point on researching the way to do it and registering the app with Google. Another point for getting Javascript code provided by Google, modifying it to submit a hidden form with email and name to session controller with method called login_google to handle these information. This method check if user exists in the database by email and login with existing account or create a new account for first time user.
Description: Share web app link on Google Plus with Google API Actor/persona: Wilson is a user who is very active on his Google Plus. Precondition/trigger: After finishing a match of Geomancer, Wilson feels so great that he needs to let everyone in his circle know about this amazing game Postcondition: Wilson finds the Google share button at top left of the game page. He clicks on the share button and it prompt him to Google sign in if he has not done that already. After signing in with Google, he see a post compiled with the link to Geomancer app ready to be posted on his Google Plus. Velocity discussion: This feature was implemented after the login/logout with Google API. It takes approximately 2 hours for research and another 2 hours to implement and debug so total is equivalent to 1 story point.
Description: Save user's game statistic to database and display it on profile Actor/persona: Bob is a enthusiastic user and love to review his accomplishment even in playing game Precondition/trigger: After a Geomancer match, Bob would like to see more information about his match aside of the points. Postcondition: Bob goes to his profile page and sees the following statistics displayed: last game duration, latest points (points of his last game), enemies killed (in last game), projectiles fired (how many shots made in last game) and accuracy (total shots that actually hit the enemies in last game). Velocity discussion: This feature was implemented by keeping track of variables in Unity and passing those values into JavaScript, and then the database. It took 8 story points to implement this process. All the team members spend approximately a day to figure out how to pass the information from Unity game to Rails by JavaScript. It is basically a JavaScript code that embedded into the game saving all the necessary information and pass it to a JavaScript function in the game index html page. This function submit a http request to Rails user_controller with update method that handle the information. This is the most critical part in both profile and leaderboard so each story get 5 points. 3 points are for coding and debugging the ideas.
Description: implementation of leaderboard Actor/personas: Bob is an ambitious users and loves to see how he performed in the game comparing to other players Precondition/ triggers: After a Geomancer match, Bob would like to see how he stacks up compared to others who play Geomancer. Action/ postconditions: Bob goes to the leaderboard and sees the following statistics displayed: number of enemies killed (last game), and score (last game). He is happy to see that he makes to the leaderboard. Velocity discussion: This feature implemented was worth 8 story points. It takes 5 points as discussed above to figure out how to get the data from Unity to JavaScript to the database. 3 points are for additional controller, view, implement ideas and debug.
Description: Final version of game Actor/personas: Bob is a student and regular user Precondition/ Triggers: Swamped student Bob is looking to unwind for a bit Action/ Postconditions: Bob loads the game in webpage, and decides to play a single player game. He can choose one of 5 elements to use to defeat waves of small and big enemies of each elemental type. Small enemies chase you at a fast pace. Big enemies chase you at a bit of a slower pace while also shooting projectiles at you to try and knock you off the stage. Getting hit by these projectiles does not make you lose lives. Every element is strong against one of the other elements: metal beats wood, wood beats earth, earth beats water, water beats fire, fire beats metal. Bob realizes that the game has many more enemies characters with nice animations, comparing to the boring balls or repetitive characters in the earlier versions. Bob can: -start the game by pressing the spacebar -play again when he loses by pressing the R key -move around with WASD -move the mouse around to aim at enemies -shoot projectiles at enemies to kill them with the left mouse button -Use the F key, 1 2 3 4 5 keys, or mouse scroll wheel to cycle through elemental projectiles -keep track of how many enemies he’s killed by looking at his score Bob cannot: -leave the boundaries of the level otherwise he will lose -continue his current game after getting hit four times; his score will be reset upon playing again After playing the game for a bit, Bob has reached a new high score and is satisfied with his relaxation time going into this game. Velocity Discussion: This part took 5 story points, and included the entire final version of the game with all the animations and functionality.
| Stories | Story points |
|---|---|
| User login, logout, signup | 3 |
| Admin has different profile page | 1 |
| User update their own information | 1 |
| Admin can see list of user and update other users' information | 1 |
| Single player game with animation | 8 |
| Google Login/logout API | 2 |
| GooglePlus Share | 1 |
| Save statistic information from game to database and display on profile | 8 |
| Implement leaderboard | 8 |
| Single player game final modifications and all animations | 5 |
Each point is approximately half day of works (4 hours). For iteration 2, there are total 10 story points completing in 2 weeks by a team of 5 people. Comparing to iteration 1, there is increasing in velocity.
There will be five main user interface pages in this game. The first is a main menu screen with options to play the game single player, multiplayer, view your profile, change settings, and quit the game. There will also be a leaderboard on the side to show you the highest scores so far in the game. The second is the profile page. This page shows you all the achievements you have completed, your statistics in game (such as number of enemies defeated, number of times each elemental weapon was used, number of deaths, etc.), your inventory (upgrades, aesthetic features, etc) and your currency/points. The currency/points are used to buy upgrades and other things stored in your inventory. The third is the multiplayer lobby. This will be where you wait for others to join your game, and will show you a list of all of you friends. The fourth is the single player “arena”. This is where you play the game in single player mode. There will be an area of the screen devoted to displaying the current elemental attack you are using, as well as bars that fill up for each element. When the bar is full, a super attack can be used to clear the screen of enemies. The fifth is the multiplayer “arena”. This is where you play the game with others. The elemental bars are still shown, and only display your stats in terms of progress to getting a super attack.