The Product Background
CrimeBloc is a retro multiplayer mafia game set in Eastern Europe. It was created to play in browsers with potential usage on mobile devices. The main idea of the game is to encourage people to the group and build strong social bonds, as this is the only way to succeed in the goal of the game – to become the strongest gang. The unique flow of the game makes players spend hours in the company of their gangs.
The Task
The main goal for AlphaX team was to take the old idea of the game with the strong community and transfer it to a more modern engine and expand the community of fans with new people who share the aesthetic and spirit of adventurism that imbues the game. Among other things, the goal was to develop an already existing world with unique features.
The Solution we created
Since the game was written on PHP, which was a great solution for that period of time, we decided to create the game on the new engine from the scratch. We choose the next stack of technologies – MERN, which stands for MongoDB, Express, React, Node, after the four key technologies that make up the stack. This approach allowed us to easily construct a 3-tier architecture (frontend, backend, database) entirely using JavaScript and JSON.
The Current Features
The first version of the game has its strong logic and our goal was to make save it and make it stronger and more attractive for newcomers. Here are some of the features we added to the game.
We taught the system to:
- keep watching for gangs and players to avoid snowballing and do let them become too strong
- regulate the level of crime in cities, focusing on the actions of playersю This made players move to other cities and increase their power there almost from the scratch, but at the same time watch their properties in cities they’ve just left.
Our team updated the current types of things, like properties – made them more functional to use, and expanded the list of roles in the gang, to manage all the real estate. And all this staff – without control from the admin site.
The next step we’re doing at the moment – creating the event system with its logic. This will be not only a good opportunity to upgrade your character in the game but also pump your brain. The conditions of the game become more complicated and without a good approach and logic, you will lose more than you get.
This is just a piece of what the AlphaX team plans to bring to the next version of the CrimeBloc.