Mermaids
Mermaids is a massively multiplayer game currently in development by the EGG lab at Georgia Tech. It is intended to be a non-traditional MMO in that there is no combat. Instead the game engenders cooperative play, community building, and world creation.
I was taken on this project as a programmer in the spring 2009 semester and worked on it through the spring 2010 semester. I spent a good deal of time learning the ins and outs of the program as well as learning how to work within the Multiverse engine that the game is built upon. I was asked to do minor to major bug fixes as I learned but my first 'real' job was to add Wii remote control integration to the game.
Adding Wii remote control turned out to be a very interesting task because at first it required finding the technology that would support the Wii remote and I thought that would be the hardest part. Once that was completed, however, it quickly became evident that the task would require a good deal of interaction design work which I found really interesting.
In my final semester on the project we shifted gears and I actually worked on the social system for Mermaids. Specifically I was asked to implement the designed Bond system for the game. This involved both server and client coding in Python and Java and in the end the players were able to create temporary bonds (quest parties) and permanent bonds (friends). I would have liked to work on it further and enable chat but, alas, we all must graduate sometime.
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