AndSpy!

Inspiration

With the challenge being an icebreaker, our team agreed that games along the lines of Werewolf, Mafia, or Spyfall are great at quickly building comradery between strangers. By bringing a similar game to discord, we can bring this to even more people & connect during a time of self-isolations & lockdowns.

What it does

Players can setup & join lobbies where they communicate with a discord bot to play through rounds of questions, all while one player is hiding the fact they have no clue what their AndTitle is! Each round a player is voted off, until either the spy has bluffed their way to victory, or the team bands together to beat them.

How we built it

We began by blocking out exactly how the game would work from a user point of view. After we knew what we wanted, we created a rough design of classes & methods, proving invaluable when it came time to actually implement, The end product was written in python with heavy use of Discords API and communicate with the bot - who's being hosted online on repl.it!

Challenges we ran into

It turns out networking & multiplayer is kind of hard. We attempted at implementing this over pygame, Unity, over SMS and even over scratch. These hours were spent debugging API's, fiddling with new languages, and scouring years old stack overflow pages. Each of these attempts helped us really focus down on what the project needed, and led us to discord.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It works! We actually have a multiplayer game that goes from start to finish! The game's genuinely fun and encourages conversation between all of its players. After the lack of sleep, copious amounts of stress, and painful debugging, having an actual product is a great feeling!

What we learned

We touched on and tinkered with what felt like a dozen APIs before settling down and really getting a good grasp of Discords Python API, which ended up being a perfect fit for us! On a less technical side, we struggled with designing a game that's actually fun and incentivised conversation, and will carry the lessons learnt into any further game like projects!

What's next for AndSpy!

With this sort of product, we can really take it anywhere. We discussed adding in a dynamic voice-over with Alexa or adding more complicated roles that users could try when they got the hang of AndSpy.