Blob Party!

Looking for a better, more engaging way to connect with your friends in a virtual environment? Come to Blob Party! Join your friends as adorable blobs who bump into each other, chat and play games.

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Blob Party!

After over a year of trying to connect with peers using only virtual options we have felt a notable lack of meaningful interaction. Online fatigue is real. With the added pressure of being on video or finding fun activities that are both remote and still engaging, there is a clear need to have a platform for casual chatting, games with friends and conversational, natural encounters. The Studio Track, with its opportunity to focus on social interaction, especially since work and school solutions tend to take priority, was most appealing to us.

In an attempt to tackle this chronic lack-of-connectivity problem, we've created Blob Party! With unbelievably cute blob characters which move around the screen and interact with each other based on user input - including bouncing off the walls and sharing chat messages - we have a platform that meshes an aesthetically pleasing and welcoming environment with a potential range of collaborative group activities.

Build Strategy:

The development of Blob Party! began on a very conceptual level. We needed an entirely different representation of a person. To mitigate the cons we've observed of frequent video conferencing apps we wanted to remove the face and camera element, but retain a design that is still able to communicate and interact like a human being. Although our blobs don't have real faces, we anthropomorphize the blobs in a manner that can emote. The navigation of the lobby is intentional too in its movement and exploration, particularly keeping in mind that all of this is designed to be done with friends.

On the technical side, we knew from the beginning we'd want be working primarily in JavaScript. The backend is developed in Node.js and Express.js. Our initial research on browser game design (a totally new area for all of us) led us to the discovery of a few important tools as well. We use Phaser, a 2D HTML game framework, for rendering and blob physics. The Socket.IO JavaScript library allows us to manage the real-time multiplayer users, handling input and interaction seamlessly. Our assets were designed in Figma.

Our original plan for Blob Party! included a lobby, as our current app does, where blobs can move around freely. We wanted them to meet in different color gradient zones of the screen where they would be transported to a game page and then could play a realtime multiplayer game together. We intended to include a reimagined multiplayer game of snake as a main functionality of the web app. Up to four players would be controlling a single snake, each limited to the control of movement in only one direction through an arrow key (when fewer than four players joined, some or all players would have control of multiple keys). Upon hovering over the gradient zones of the lobby the environment would change to a homepage for the game of snake where the player's blobs would be relocated.

Challenges:

We ran into a few challenges which really tested our skills and problem solving capabilities. We had difficulty receiving and processing single-key inputs from many users to control one object, as well as some struggles organizing the flow between the states of our app. We were not confident our snake game could be properly rendered and tested in time so we prioritized the movement of the blobs because of the importance to our social design.

Even with these challenges we are satisfied with how we handled the new learning curves and with the end product we created. We met several of our goals and are proud of our product design. Our blob figures, graphics and general aesthetics do present the project in an attractive and inviting way to users. Those of us who focused on the programming portion had never worked with Phaser or Express before and none of us had much experience with JavaScript in general. Our team member who worked on design had never animated graphics before. Stepping out of our comfort zone was a major accomplishment and learning from this exposure was beneficial for our knowledge and future project experience.

Future Development:

Future versions of Blob Party! would incorporate many of these ideas which we envisioned, but ran out of time to properly implement. For our blob functionality we want to animate the blobs. This was another one of the challenges we faced - we actually had many sprite sheets prepared for each blob, but struggled with the Phaser.js inner workings in order to implement the animations successfully. For Blob Party! the next cornerstone of development is the multiplayer gaming aspect. It has huge potential for a diverse variety of gaming options and personalizations. We want to include other classic games such as tic tac toe and different genres of trivia. Ultimately we want Blob Party! to be a hub of entertaining activities that users could navigate using adorable blobs which imitate that meaningful human interaction we all need.

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