/barnga_online

:jp: Game framework for teaching cultural understanding :us:

Primary LanguageJava

#Culturecode

Description

This game is meant to simulate advantages and disadvantages of knowing certain information in a society or not. For example, when submersing yourself into a different culture than what you belong to, you are sometimes unprivileged from the starting point because of the fact that you don't know the implicit "rules" of the society. In this game, by giving some players various "privileges" and disadvantages to some, the players can experience the frustration (or maybe the pleasure) of being in those positions.

This game was inspired by the game Barnga, created by Sivasailam (Thiagi) Thiagarajan and Barbara Steinwachs (1990).

Installation

Requirements

  • JDK (1.7 used for testing)
  • Web server to host the client web pages

When compiling from source

  • Apache Maven (3.0.4 used for testing)

The following browsers have been used to test the functionalities of the program.

  • Google Chrome
  • Firefox
  • Internet Explorer 11

Installing

Using the pre-built jar file

  1. Download the jar file from releases

Compiling from source

  1. git clone https://github.com/NigoroJr/culturecode
  2. cd culturecode/server
  3. mvn clean install
  4. mvn assembly:single

Running

  1. Edit server/culturecode.conf
  2. Run the program
    • java -jar path/to/jar/file
  3. Edit client/client.js and change localhost to whatever your webpage's address is, and put it to a publicly-accessibly directory.

See the Wiki page for more details.

Configurations

Adding a TOML file in the same directory as the jar file allows customizing basic behavior of the game. For example, the world size, number of teams, and how each team can see other teams/food can be defined in this file. See the provided sample.toml for various parameters.

Also check the Wiki for more details.

Limitations

Testing has been done with:

  • 17 clients in 10 teams simultaneously moving in a 60,000 x 60,000 world with approximately 500 food.
  • 4 teams in 30,000 x 30,000 world with approximately 20,000 food.

The current limitation, due to the world scrolling when pressing the arrow keys in Firefox, is that the browser's default keyboard shortcuts become unavailable (like F5 for refreshing).

License

MIT License