AI-POLY

screenshot

Inspiration

With the theme being "Monopoly", our initial idea was to make a sort of parody game where all the players were parodies of existing companies in the 'AI Race' However as we were going, we decided to pivot further into the social commentary aspect, by highlighting some of the unethical behaviors the big AI companies partake in.

What it does

This is AI-POLY, a modern satirical twist on Monopoly to highlight some of the absurdities of the current economic landscape. Acquire plots of land to build data centers, buy out startups and achieve AGI. But make sure to not let the bubble burst, or people may be unhappy.

How we built it

We decided to build this as a browser-based game. The entire project is coded almost exclusively in JavaScript. For the core game engine, we wanted to use a dedicated tool. After a bit of research, we chose boardgame.io, a js framework designed for turn-based games. We felt it would be the perfect fit for managing all the state, player turns, and rule interactions required for a Monopoly-style game. For the visuals we used React components.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was definitely the lack of documentation for boardgame.io. Because it's a bit of a niche framework, there just weren't many tutorials, Stack Overflow answers etc. and we struggled to figure out how to connect the game state to React. In fact a majority of the effort was just in making sure the game board was being displayed correctly on screen. However once we got that going, it was smooth sailing from there.

What we learned

We learned a lot about using React, as this was some of our first experience with it. This was honestly also good experience with learning niche unfamiliar frameworks in a short period of time and getting it to work, even if you don't understand all the bells and whistles. We also enjoyed doing the CSS theming at the very end, and coming up with jokes within the project.