Festival2012/Submit/ParticleQuest: Hack and Slash at CERN
- Title of session: ParticleQuest: Hack and Slash at CERN
- Your name and affiliation: Alejandro Avilés (@OmeGak)
- Session format: Design Challenge
Contents
What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?
ParticleQuest is a fork of BrowserQuest, a game developed by Mozilla Foundation, that started during the CERN Webfest last August and turned out to be the winning project (Yay!). Our wish is to create a science based game with which to teach particle physics while at the same time providing puzzles and multiplayer experience in a Legend of Zelda style world. And all of this only using your browser!
If you are considering joining, great! There is still a lot to do. Programmer guru? Your infinite wisdom will be of help to expand the functionalities and mechanics of the game! Graphic designer? Awesome 8-bit graphics ain't gonna draw themselves! Gamer since childhood? We need appealing gameplay and mind stimulating puzzles. Music composer? What's life without music? Skillful or just curious? Be sure you'll have something to contribute.
How do you see that working?
After a brief explanation of ParticleQuest and how to get started with it, we'll be getting our hands dirty creating new content for the game. I'll bring some TO-DOs and depending on the number of participants and their skills we'll pick some of them to finish off. I can picture the session having different teams working on different fields: code, graphics, gameplay, story, community development, ...
How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?
- 5 buddies: One team only. Close range (code) hacking focused on a few goals.
- 15 buddies: Several teams. All the above plus media content creation.
- 50 buddies: Several teams. All the above plus community development. Let's make ParticleQuest bigger!
How long within your session before someone else can teach this?
ParticleQuest has a wiki with self explanatory information on how to get started. In less than 30 minutes, everybody will be able to start coding, testing, forking and committing. Graphic designers and philosophers of the gaming arts will be ready right away.
What do you see as outcomes after the festival?
I see an improved version of ParticleQuest, tons of new ideas on how to improve it, and a stronger community willingly to keep the project alive and kicking. ;)
