Mild Peril was conceived, designed and built in a week as part of /dev/fort x.

At a /dev/fort, around a dozen people retreat to an isolated location with no internet access, and work together to make something new for the internet. Previous forts have produced Spacelog, Be Habitual and Earth Lens. This fort, we made a game.

Mild Peril was inspired by Paul Pod’s experience of managing the flow of water across his smallholding in Wales. Few of us had any experience making games (or any experience at all of hydrology), but learning by doing is one of the fun parts of /dev/fort.

We began by experimenting with several game mechanics, playing jury-rigged board game versions made from post-its and purloined scrabble counters. Once we’d found a promising approach, we split into three groups: one to build the game engine, one to design levels, and one to design the game’s UI.

The engine team created algorithms to model the water’s flow and ebb, balancing complexity with intuitive acquatic behaviour. At the same time, the UI team found a way to represent the game field that was suitably playful and iconic but also conveyed the information needed to solve each puzzle.

By Saturday morning, we had a working version of the game running in browser. Despite regularly being sucked into playing instead of building, the team resolved bugs and added in the final elements over the weekend. Andrew even found time to make a parallel version of the game in Unity.

/dev/fort x was Andrew Godwin, Ash Berlin, Dai Vaughan, George Brocklehurst, James Aylett, James Coglan, Kat Matfield, Mazz Mosley, Paul Pod, Ryan Alexander.

Now, why not play the game?