When the responsibility of running my high school’s game of Assassin fell upon my hands, I knew that the game needed a huge change. For those who don’t know, Assassin is a game where each person is assigned a target who they have to “kill” (via water gun) by the end of a time period. One must eliminate their target to move onto the next round, where they are assigned another target, and the time period gets shorter and shorter as the game continues. At the end, there is one winner who gets a massive cash prize and bragging rights, of course.
People in my town took it seriously, and though COVID was still messing with school (half of the student body attended virtually) demand for the game was high. So, my friends and I took it upon our own hands to make the game possible for everyone who wanted to compete.
Our first issue: how were we supposed to make it fair for those who simply never leave home due to online school? Our solution was simple: on top of having a target to eliminate within the time period, there would also have to be a location you had to reach – a location which your assassin knew. This was our way of getting people out of the house.
Administering, as well as keeping the game exciting and interesting is difficult, especially when the school is virtual. Therefore, my friends and I created a website which people were constantly checking with a kill feed – people could see immediately who was killed and when. This design took us a while, but we made it as intuitive as possible to make sure it worked.
At the end of the day, the game worked out swimmingly. I credit the game’s success to our dedication to designing the game so that it was accessible, intuitive, and exciting. The team was also incredible — we had an artist, a designer, and a full stack web developer and our talents combined made this whole thing happen. Here’s the link to our website that we created!
