Fist Full of Nanas
We decided early on that we wanted to create a fast-paced social game that fellow participants can play with their groups at the event. From this we felt that the best representation of 'unreliable' we could incorporate was the unreliability of the alliances the players will make throughout the game.
The game is based around a four-person mexican standoff. Each player can use a Nintendo Joy-Con to communicate with each other by sending vibrations before deciding who to shoot. Once all players have locked in their choices, their decisions are revealed to each other and shot players are killed.
The winner of the standoff earns a pot of 500 points. However, up to two players can win each round, with the pot then being split slightly unevenly between them. The inclusion of two winners per round encourages players to form alliances outside of the game to maximise their chance of survival; while the slight randomness in distribution of the pot will introduce conflict between the winners in order to secure first place.
My team throughout this weekend consisted of fellow University of South Wales students Nicky Jones, Khalid Ali, Jack Smerdon and Steve Sparkes.
Within this team, my key responsibility was gameplay programming. As well as this, I also developed tools such as mouse and AI control of the players to allow my team to debug the game simultaneously whilst the Joy-Cons were in use. The AI was then improved upon with a trust system to bring it to a high enough level that it could be incorporated into the final game, however, we decided against this since it would remove the aspect of human unreliability. Source code for Fist Full of Nanas can be found at the group's GitHub repository.
