deCide Effect

deCide Effect is a multiplayer, mobile experience where players make tough decisions that will effect themselves and the other players. These Life-Boat ethics decisions are presented as a "mini-game" to keep the player engaged and for them to be more honest about the decisions they are making. Choices are tracked throughout the game and the player is given information based on their decision making tendencies and their relationship to each of the other players. deCide Effect was the recipient of the Alumni Choice Grand Champion award at the Neumont 2020 Capstone Invitational.

Project Details

Duration: Sept. 2019 - Jan. 2020

Technologies: Unity, Socket.io, Node.js

Platform: Android, PC

Unity

Multiplayer

Mobile

deCide Effect was originally developed as a ten week long senior project. The game takes heavy inspiration from the butterfly effect and chaos theory. The game plays similarly to the popular game Jackbox where the game takes place on a single PC while individual players use their phones to connect to a central host that receives player input. Server side code was developed in Node.js for Socket.io support on both the host and client ends.

The original plan for deCide Effect was to create a narrative that many players would be able to experience. Decisions would come up based off of plot points, resulting in a branching story. This was found to be a very unreliable source of collecting data on players decisions. Instead, the decisions were presented in more of a "mini-game" format. This allowed players to answer questions in a less binary fashion, allowing their final analysis to be more in-depth.