Allure Bay Virtual Casino

The Allure Bay Virtual Casino was created as a digital twin to the "real" physical Allure Bay Casino. It was intended to provide a replacement for the travelling aspect of a non-virtual game. It provided a justification for why you would be hanging out in a virtual space while trying to plan a real heist.

When it became clear that we were going to be running the event entirely virtually, we very quickly decided that we needed to build something a little bit more immersive than the Washington Trail experience from 2020. The obvious choice was to build an interactive virtual casino.

Technology

Pull requests were submitted from 16 people in the base Casino repo along, and much work was done by others contributing to art, Spiderdog, and non-Casino-hosted puzzles. The first PR occurred on December 13th, 2020 kicking off 7+ months of active development.

• Client side:
  • Phaser3, the core game was built on this open-source Javascript game engine.
  • TypeScript was used for the majority of the client side code.
  • node.js was used to host the client side and distribute assets and game code.
  • Tiled is a tile map editor was used to build out the casino.
• Server side:
  • ASP.NET Core was used to host the server side.
  • SignalR was used for core client and server communication.
  • Broken into seven different Azure Web Apps for load balancing and scaling.
    • Multiplayer, Chat, Spiderdog, and shared hubs used by different puzzles.

Art

Inspiration for the art style came from some older isometric style games like Mega Man Battle Network.

All art was created by Intern Game staff members many with little to no prior artistic experience. Our artists worked tirelessly to produce a plethora of unique and original art pieces to turn our casino from a simple empty place into an exciting lively virtual world.

To populate our world, a unique set of customizable characters and accessories were created.