The making of a Custom Mobile Game

Thriv has been known to host some pretty nice parties for our talents and clients over the years. Starting from small, our parties didn't have a bigger concept beyond just gathering around and having fun. Last year, we were thinking that we’d like to make our parties even more memorable and unique, so we put some effort into creating those larger concepts. The latest one was a Tron inspired party created in collaboration with Helsinki Synth City (HSC) featuring a mini-synthwave festival and most relevantly a custom built mobile game. We’d like to open a bit how the game was created.

Starting Points

Great things are done together, so for this party, we sought a partnership with someone from a different field, but sharing the same passion for creating unique experiences and even some of the same brand feel. HSC was clearly such a partner. Basically a synthwave record label and a gig organizer, we were happy to learn that they also had experience from creating gaming experiences for events. After discussing the possible themes that would fit our futuristic nostalgia, we landed on drawing inspiration from Tron. A movie series originally from the 80s, but soon to release the latest entry Tron: Ares. So highly relevant still today. And also very well known for its stellar soundtrack work by the likes of Daft Punk and Wendy Carlos, with Nine Inch Nails working on the upcoming title. Naturally, Thriv has no rights to the Tron brand or its logo or any other assets, which meant none of those were used in the marketing or naming of the event.

Including a game into an event is in our experience an excellent choice. A game not only facilitates social interaction between people beyond your previously known acquaintances, but is also the most immersive medium invented due to its active user participation. The experience of a game, one could say the actual game, is more than anywhere else created in the interaction between the game object and the game players. All of our events have a strong element of interactivity. We don’t want to just present to an audience. We create things together. While we don’t see our Thriv brand as particularly a gaming brand, many associate the esthetics primarily with early digital games, and Tron is a gaming brand beyond any doubt, so we had that going for us.

The genre of a possible game was quite easy to decide. Hardly any other games work as deeply themed party games for larger in person audiences than some kind of social deduction games. Further, HSC even had some experience in running games based on the Werewolf design. Even if you are not familiar with social deduction games as a genre, you may know Mafia boardgame, Among Us as a digital game, or The Traitors (Petolliset in Finnish) on TV. However, no existing design would work as such, since we really want to push the boundary with our ambition level, but also none of these games had faced our design challenges.

Game Design

Our game needed to meet very unique requirements all stemming from the basic characteristics of our parties. These include our audience, our willingness to keep the process of joining the fun very fluent and lightweight, the other activities of the night and the booked venue. For example, the venue was naturally driven more from the artists and show perspective than from the game’s perspective. One could sum up the more difficult requirements into these four: Up to a hundred concurrent players that don’t know each other or even their names beforehand No firm participation commitment beforehand Fixed playtime with a small amount of possible variation Single large room as a playing area with various levels of noise

Luckily, we had many passionate game designers on our organizing team including myself.

First ideas for the overall design had different groups and factions and several levels of voting by which we were trying to match more closely some of the themes from the movies. For example, instead of the first group to just gather enough members to win, we could have had all large enough groups voting for the future of the Grid with different people then gaining the actual win based on a combination of group membership and election result. However, as usual, these ideas were all definitely too complex. Not that our audience wouldn’t have been able to play these and we could even be comfortable to explain these, but our timeline and playtesting possibilities were very limited. Since we had no way of testing the game with a full amount of players and we only had about three weeks until the event, any complex game would’ve certainly been broken.

In the end we converged in a game where there are three roles: users, programs and viruses, with the users trying to be the first to gather a large group of programs to win and the viruses trying to infiltrate these groups. The game still had multiple tricky enough parts like how do we enable the viruses to know each other and coordinate, but still be able to pretend towards the users that they are programs, or how do we keep everyone sufficiently informed about the game state without revealing any individual’s role or telling directly what should be done next.

Implementation

As the game design and rules started to fall into place, we progressed with the technical implementation. HSC had experience with a low code platform Adalo that creates both web applications and pretty nice mobile experiences with a very low effort. Thus we were able to make a very smooth user experience and in 100% Tron theme. In addition to the design, we worked on the architecture of the application together, but the implementation credits need to go to HSC.

Testing was again a joint effort, where we utilized our whole Thriv team. This was such a stretch as we tested a game intended for up to a hundred players with eight in a single session lasting a bit more than an hour in a completely different kind of venue and environment. All of the other tests weren’t even proper playtests, but just the implementation team testing how the underlying software behaved.

There were only very minimal changes we needed to make to the game design based on what we were and weren’t able to implement. To take an example: Some things in the design would’ve required randomization, but this wasn’t readily available on the Adalo components used, so we ended up relying on obfuscation. Not telling the players the exact rules works like randomization in many cases.

Like with any good short project, last changes were pushed to production on the day of the game.

Gameplay

The game didn't start fully smoothly. We had an idea of splitting participants into roles as they came in, to make sure we had the right ratio of different roles, but as usual the documentation got mixed up. Additionally, our instructions in the game application were correct, but we had unfortunate typos in contrast with the in-game instructions on how to get started. If there had been a thousand players, these would probably have been catastrophic, but with our scope, we did what everyone would do and fixed it in production by basically instructing everyone to only look at the information on the app, which we could edit online, and disregard all of the role assignments done at the door of the venue and displayed on stage. In the end the delay to starting the game was perhaps only ten minutes and since the game went by a lot faster than we had anticipated, it was all good.

And after about twenty minutes when the winner was announced, the crowd shouted to play another round.