Lost in the Stars

Everyone in the jam venue joins the game, spawning with their spaceship somewhere in space, equipped with the ability to accelerate, brake or transmit a sound signal into their direction of view. The goal is to find two other players each with sounds different from their own and meet at one spot. During the game the “commander” played by the developers have the ability to overview the whole of the game world, for everyone to see on the projector. They guide the players by "pinging" them (sending a signal to them that shows a special message on the client), assisting in finding each other in the real world as well, so not already completed teams can start real-life conversation and discuss strategies to find the remaining player(s) – effectively mirroring what they do in-game.
Jam Site: 
Cologne Game Lab
Jam year: 
2018
Platforms: 
Web standard (HTML5, Java, JavaScript, Flash)
Technology Notes: 
node.js (server), three.js (client)
Installation Instructions: 

The nature of this “mini MMO” game (networked multiplayer with a comparatively  big number of players) makes it very hard to test before the actual presentation without time dedicated to it by everyone on site and after the jam the scenario is hard to set up as well, so that we decided to make this a one-time event – A game that is only played (and gameplay-tested) once, ever.

 

Therefore there is no download link and no public repository of the game. Screenshots and this description is the most anyone will ever be able to experience it again. #artsyfartsy #deep

 

Postmortem:

We managed to implement all the features we wanted to implement from the start (or ever) and stress-tests with about 20 (which is about what we expected) "players" (a lot of browser windows and phones) showed sufficient performance and the mechanics seemed like they were implemented robustly enough, which all was very much a positive surprise for us.

Happily and sadly after the first few minutes, with a few players actually sending signals to each other and moving in the game map, the player number went a little too high (presumably 40-50) and the server froze, which concluded our presentation.

Credits: 

Moritz Kneilmann (Programming)

Joel Schumacher (Programming) - http://theshoemaker.de

Game Stills: 

Team