mass
mass was an experimental multiplayer game created by myself, Johnny Download, SJQ, and Nesta. It was initially created for Ludum Dare 46, but as the game jam’s deadline snuck up on us, we decided to leave the competition in favor of continuing development on the project. This turned out to be a good decision, and by April 25th (eight days after LD46 started) we launched mass.
Description:
mass’s concept is simple - there is a blob in the center of a large space. It has four life support modules connected to it, which very slowly lose power. Your goal as a player is to make sure that those life support modules never go offline. Players are not alone in this task - mass is run as one single room, meaning that if anybody opens the game and starts playing, they’ll be in the same instance as everybody else. This also means that there is one mass. All players who play the game become responsible for keeping mass’s life support modules online.
An overview of the main area in mass.
My Role:
I was the lead on this project, taking on programming, visual design, part of sound design, and general direction. You can find more details on mass’s itch.io page.
If mass’s life support modules go offline and mass dies, then mass dies. The game ends, and the server is inaccessible forever.
This puts mass as a game in a very unique position - it’s designed to be lost and become obscure - and only by coordinated player actions can this be avoided.
Why it’s important:
mass is an important project to me because it was a chance to practice using backend web resources like Heroku, NodeJS, or MongoDB. Before 2020, I hadn’t touched any backend languages in any detail - so after learning NodeJS at the beginning of the year, mass was my first chance to use it for something real. mass is also important to me because it gave me a chance to cultivate a community. In order for players to keep mass alive, they needed to communicate. mass by design doesn’t have any communication (other than player movement) built in, so I used this as a chance to start a community Discord revolving around my game projects. It turned out to be a great idea, and while mass was running my Discord became a hub for players to chat about mass, it’s just-about-to-begin story, and player’s duties.
Download:
mass died on Monday, June 22nd, 2020. This means that mass is no longer available to play. Video footage on this page was taken from players who recorded their time with the game.
