Inspiration
I like to think I can hold a good conversation, but I’m not always confident in my ability to start one, especially when introducing myself to new people. Often, when my friends and I are all sitting around and eating lunch, someone will start playing one of those word games - wordle, connections, crossword, etc. And everyone else follows in their lead. Before any of us notice, we’ve all become sucked into our phones, and have stopped talking to each other! I wondered, what if there was a similar game that encouraged us to talk. It took a lot of iteration from that point to arrive at the idea that I have now.
Objective
Although the goal of this game is to cause conversation, something I strictly avoided is explicitly prompting the players to say something. It's really important to me that the conversations arising from this game feel natural.
Methods
I don’t have much coding experience. In previous hackathons, I’ve been on teams where the other members want to use tailwind and react and all these fancy frameworks. I am completely hopeless when it comes to debugging those things. For this project, I just used what I know how to interpret and debug: javascript, html, and css. Claude helped me write the code, and I was able to fix it when necessary.
Challenges
I had a different idea for the versus mode originally, and I wasn’t even considering making a coop mode. You can view the planning documents with the link at the bottom. I implemented my original idea and then realized the game was too hard. My first solution was to just make the coop mode because it would obviously work. But I didn't give up on the versus mode, I just thought really long and hard about how I could change the logic around to make the game easier, and I eventually arrived at the current version.
What I Learned
I learned a lot about using css and html. I also learned some game theory: navigating the logic of creating a game is very challenging and requires so much careful consideration. The hardest thing was figuring out how to make people say something without prompting them, and making that feel natural.
