We’re at our annual company retreat, in the beautiful Victorian countryside. With a crazy plan for the entire company to work together towards building and launching a game between now and Friday (that’s less than 3 days). The game will be complete with an app, website, promo/advertising and user management. All in the name of “team building”, what may seem like a pretty lofty goal to some, we’re quietly confident we can get it done.

Why? For a bit of background, the few of us that were in the office last Xmas decided to have a little hackathon. In 2 days, we managed to launch a fully-fledged app for Github users to interact with each other. It was somewhat like tinder, where you swipe left or right to choose wether or not you wanted to speak with someone. A pretty cool idea, it gained more than 2K users in the few days after Xmas. You can find out about it here.

Even though we left Gitr back in 2014, and haven’t supported it since, it has served as an excellent reminder of what a team who are working together to achieve a single goal can achieve in such a short period of time. With one designer, three devs and a marketer we managed to achieve something pretty neat so we wondered … what could we achieve with a full team?

That brings us to the now. Aside from participating in group building activities like, trying to kill each other in laser skirmish, playing golf, eating great food and drinking a fair bit, we’re going to use the majority of our time trying to hack together this game. The hope is that the entire team can experience the thrill we had for the days prior to launching Gitr.

Be very very quiet, we’re hunting developers.

what is reddit factions?

It’s a game that that will feature reddit as a game board. Using our own technology within Bugherd (a point and click bug tracker). Think of it like a mashup of Drug/Dope Wars & turn based strategy game Triton.

Players will take part in a war to dominate reddit, by installing the reddit Factions browser extension. They can then choose to join an existing faction or create their own (by claiming their favourite subreddit). The player can then gain experience (XP) points to level up and battle for opposing subreddits.

An example of how to claim subreddit for Hobart … but would you really want to? ;)

Just like Triton, players can occupy opposing territory or hold their own. Players must choose between playing a strategic defence game or focus on assault.

An attack on r/Sydney by r/Melbourne … A battle as old as time.

The game features a balance between passive gameplay and active elements. The end goal is eventually taking over all of reddit.

it’s not going to be that easy …

About factions:

Factions are tied to a particular subreddit, (e.g. /r/programming) and are considered natives of that subreddit. No matter where they travel in the world of reddit, they will still call /r/programming their “home”. A faction cannot change it’s home, and nobody can claim their home as their own (although they can occupy it).

About occupying:

There will be rules around joining and leaving factions, occupying other bases and how that occupation will affect the subreddit (still to be determined). In brief, when a faction attacks an opposing faction, they are aiming to become occupiers of that subreddit. If they are successful, they exist as if this is now another “home” for the players there.

You’d need to get to recruiting or levelling up to defend this subreddit successfully.

About ticks:

A tick is the unit of time used in the game to allocate XP points and perform player actions. Every player is in a queue. If they choose to move to attack or defend, their action is performed on the next tick. If they’re doing nothing they will accrue XP points passively instead.

How long a tick is and how many XP points can be collected is still being nutted out (along with a bunch of other rules around accruing XP points) but we’re going to make it on a sliding scale of diminishing returns. i.e. the larger your faction gets the harder it will be to maintain your points. The idea is to to incentivise players to control popular subreddits, and to encourage them to control many. Total reddit domination!

Time is obviously of the essence. We need to build all the components of the game before friday. This includes the website, the browser extension and the backend system to manage all the players.

We have the challenge of locking down the rules of gameplay, the game lingo and making it as easy as possible to join in the fun. We don’t want to make it challenging to start but difficult enough to test players skills.

“a good game is easy to learn but difficult to master”

— Nolan Bushnell, Atari Founder

We’re pretty confident in getting this turned around in less than 3 days. There are 4 backend devs, 3 frontend devs, a designer, a marketer, an analyst, a customer service rep, the CEO and office manager on the case.

It sounds like a bad joke where we all walk into a bar. Since there’s a pretty swanky bar here, hopefully we’ll be drinking in celebration and not drowning our sorrows.

Shit is getting done. Needs more todos though … there’s way more work to be had.

It’s not live yet but we’re squirrelling away on redditfactions.com to get content sorted and the subreddit is up and going (r/redditfactions) but not yet an active community. Soon …

If you like the sound of what we’re doing follow us on twitter @macropodHQ as we’ll be updating as we go.

UPDATE: You can read our progress so far here.

#redditfactions