Project Update
🌟 We have been able to create and publish the game -- Rush for the web -- on multiple platforms since we last updated you of our progress 🌟
To keep our commitment to keeping all the assets developed for the game open, we were extra careful while designing the game and choosing the licenses & development platforms. All the illustrations created for the game have been released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license and the source code for the android version is hosted on GitLab. A link to all the resources related to the game are added to our website https://www.rushfortheweb.org.
Our game rules are released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 too, what does that mean?
By releasing the game under an open license we have tried to bring down the barriers to free access and enabled our users/players to apply their own creativity and come up with different gameplays.
We encourage players to fork our repository or copy our print and play version, remix and share their own creations openly. This practice would also boost localization of the content to fit different cultures and context.
Progress on objectives
Our initial objective was to create an easy to reproduce game on web-monetization that educates players around the basics of web-monetization in the context of practical examples of monetizing their content over the web.
We're happy to say that have successfully been able to pull off our primary objective. But like any other creative process, the outcome did not completely match the path we had envisioned. In the process of game design, we had many learnings and realizations that considerably steered our next steps. Late in the process, we came to understand the performance related challenges of our game apps. We continued our work on producing a game application, but at the same time reused the assets to host a version on tabletopia to provide users with a better and well assisted gameplay.
We also stayed firm on our secondary objective to keep the process and the outcome open. Anyone can download the illustrations, rules, educational material for the game and create their own version and distribute.
Key activities
1. Creating a game to simulate the experience of monetising content over the web
We successfully created a game - Rush for the web - that educates players around the basics of the concept by simulating some practical examples of monetizing content over the web through its gameplay by assuming the role of a creator.
2. Creating an async version of the game
We had earlier decided to create a version of the game that could be played asynchronously by players across the world. Our initial bet was to leverage the messengers and create a set of stickers of the assets in the game to create a parallel lo-fidelity gameplay.
Down the path we came across many challenges while compressing the illustration and pivoted to creating a print and play version for a more practical asynchronous gameplay.
3. Playtesting the game
We did about seven playtesting session online, on tabletop simulator to polish and refine the gameplay before creating an application for the same. originally we had plans to conduct more sessions with groups of people outside our team and friends which became more and more challenging to execute with rising disturbances around the world. We decided to resort to a more passive approach to deal with that--through tabletopia. People have been playing our game on tabletopia and we have been looking at the available statistics to get a rough overview of the challenges players are facing.
4. Providing easy and open access to resources
To help with easy disovery of all the resources associated with the game, we created a website.
The website also links to other platforms where players can immediately start playing the game.
Communications and marketing
We presented about our game in the Creative Commons Global Summit 2021 and also spread words around the progress of the game through our Twitter account @rushfortheweb.
Our most important marketing material is our website, that we share at various platforms, since it provides visibility to every aspect of the game and also links to all the resources used in the game in most user-friendly way.
What’s next?
Polishing the gameplay is an ongoing process and we will continue to make improvemets to the game continuously.
We will continue to talk about the game in upcoming events and conferences and would even offer to organize a play testing session upon request.
We want to share the game and resources with schools and other educational institutions. We are already in talks with a few schools in Germany.
We are also planning to do a print run of the game and make the hardcopy available to schools towards the end of this year.
What community support would benefit your project?
The community is welcome to do play runs of the game in a setting of their choice, come up with their own remixes and share them. We would be happy to assist in the process and share the different variations created by the community on our website on request, with due attribution.
Our project on GitLab is also public, so anyone can fork the code base and come up with their own version of the application for android.
Additional comments
Working on the game came with a bunch of learning for us. We experienced first hand the amount of consideration that goes into keeping a game open to all, and more for ensuring a good level of accessibility.
In board games, to ensure that a gameplay is not restricted by language, special care has to be taken to keep the language dependency to the minimum. Our target is to continue to reduce the language dependency score of the game for better accessibility.
Top comments (0)