Mafia Unicorns

Inspiration

As we all know Mirro is an important project for our company and we wanted to help out with the challenges the app is facing, one being user engagement. So in order to help out on this matter, we thought a popular game will be the best solution, and “Mafia” came to our minds. We’ve adjusted the rules, made them simpler, and adapted the characters to match the Mirro’s theme. Mafia’s predecessors are The Werewolves of Millers Hollow and Cluedo – games that have been famous in Europe since the 1950s. The modern, team-based reincarnation of the game was thought up in 1986 by psychology student Dmitry Davydov. The most popular version of Mafia is as follows: the leader of the game deals out the cards to the 8-16 other players. Two or three of them are given the role of mafia members, one is told to be a policeman, and the rest are civilians. The leader announces that night has fallen and the city is falling asleep. The mafia wakes up, they make each other’s acquaintance and then “murder” one of the civilians. At night, the policeman and the leader decide which player is in with the mafia. “Morning” comes, the players wake up and discuss who could be the murderer, and, after a vote, the player with the most unconvincing story is put in jail. Days and nights continue until the mafia members are in the majority, or until all the bad guys are in jail. Each game lasts for about half an hour.

What it does

Enter the game and register for the game session, then wait for you to be assigned either to the Unicorns’ side or the Hell Gallopers’ side. Start chatting with the other game players and decide who should lose his magic dust. Vote and steal the magic dust. Do this in multiple cycles until either your team or the rival one wins by stealing all the magic dust. Our RPA has already built the game for you.

How we built it

We started from a set of rules and characters, defined within the team, then we’ve created the design for the characters using Adobe Illustrator, and animated them with Adobe Animate. The process continued with the game implementation using Node.JS as the programming language, Express as the framework and MongoDB for the database. We’ve also added a small RPA robot that can trigger the game session for the users when needed/wanted.

Challenges we ran into

On the design part, the animation was an interesting challenge as we’ve worked with a new tool and no experience. The connection between the frontend and backend was a bit difficult to do as both were made with new tech, for us, and had to connect them at the end. Implementing the backend with new technology and figuring out how to do everything that we’ve planned. Setup load testing. Creating an RPA robot with no tech background. Last but not least: Staying “alive”!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of the collaboration we’ve had between the team, most of the members were newcomers within the company and we’ve managed to find cool stuff about each other. We’re proud of our game characters and the marketing campaign we’ve made for the team and the game. We’re happy that we’ve managed to deliver something that is working as some of the technologies that we’ve used have not been used before.

What we learned

We've learned new technologies, how to stay up late and still be working and how to collaborate on a project with a short deadline.

What's next for Mafia Unicorns

We would like to have the Mafia Unicorns implemented with the full gameplay, having multiple roles, abilities, and teams. Create a link between Mirro Badges and Mafia Unicorns bonuses thus creating a better engaging environment in Mirro. Implementing Artificial Intelligence - Theory of Mind where the AI will be able to understand emotions, and they will be able to differentiate between various emotions of different people and offer insights for the HR departments and managers.