Adamara: Harsh Waters

Adamara: Harsh Waters is a real-time collaborative game editor and an isometric RPG/adventure game. In combination, they are used in workshops for political education with young people.

As the lead programmer I planned and set up the technical foundation and architecture of the project, worked on almost all parts of it, distributed tasks to a team of 3 other programmers, regularly reviewed code on pull requests and served as a bridge for production and other teams.

In a bit more detail, some of my tasks included:

• Leading the programming team:
  • Planning and distribution of tasks for a team of 3 other programmers.
  • Regularly reviewing code on pull requests.
• Choosing which technologies and libraries to use.
• Setting up a lot of project architecture/infrastructure, including:
  • Base project for both client and server.
  • The base versions of the map editor and the game.
  • The networked data pipelines for realtime-collaborative editing.
  • Undo/Redo.
  • Localization.
• Optimization in all parts of the project, e.g. game performance, editor performance, preloading, loading times and thumbnail generation.
• Implementing isometric depth sorting for arbitarily-sized entities on the game map, including moving, overlapping and flat entities.
• Adding features to all sub-editors and the game.
• Bugfixing in all parts of the code.

Key features of the editor/game:

• An isometric RPG/adventure game playable on computers and mobile tablets.
• A game editor, used both by the internal production team and by workshop participants.
  • Real-time collaborative editing support in all parts of the editor: Multiple people can work at the same time on the same part, seeing each other's changes instantly.
  • Two main editors: A map editor, and a node-based editor to set up game logic without writing code.
  • Several smaller editors to add tile assets and animations, to create and edit characters and items and to configure several other parts of the game.
  • Full localization of both the editor and the game content.
  • Undo/redo in almost all parts of the editor.

A workshop usually works like this:

1. The participants play the game.
2. Afterwards, they discuss their experiences in the game in the group.
3. The next few days of the workshop, they use the editor to create new experiences in the game editor (either as an add-on to the game, or to be played as a standalone), which can then be played by other people.

Project description