Six Seven
A family video game for the Xbox, played in the browser with controllers.
0 of 6 regions freed
The job
- When
- the four of us sit down in front of the TV,
- I want
- a game a small child and an adult can play together,
- So
- game night is one shared quest instead of four separate screens.
What it does
The Grand Sorcier Grizzly has separated Six and Seven, who love each other. His hamsters occupy the six regions of the path between them. The family plays minigames to free each region, one star at a time, over several weeks: a paint war, a kart race, a submarine, a bakery, a boss fight.
Some minigames are cooperative and some are versus, but every star goes to the family’s shared quest. Nobody can lose for everyone.
The whole game is in French, except “Six Seven”, which stays in English because that is how the kids say it.
Designed for the youngest first
The youngest player cannot read yet, so every screen works with icons, colours, faces and a voice. Each player has a help level that the minigames read: more time, bigger targets, gentler opponents. Each player also picks one stick or two. If a minigame needs two sticks, it has to offer a one-stick mode as well.
The avatars are bobbleheads with our own photos as faces, which is the reason the repository stays private and the game sits behind a login.
How it is made
- The Xbox is the test bench. The game runs in Microsoft Edge on the console. A milestone is done when it works on the TV with controllers, not when it works on a laptop.
- A test page before a game. An open-source game I tried first ran at 58 frames per second on the Xbox while its 3D view rendered pure white. So the first milestone was a page that checks sixteen graphics features one by one, on the real hardware, and the game only uses what passed.
- A plugin contract. The quest knows nothing about what happens inside a minigame. Adding one is a new folder and one line in a registry. Rules live in files with no DOM, so they can be unit tested.
- Static files, private door. A Cloudflare Worker serves the build, and Cloudflare Access puts an e-mail code in front of it, with a long session so the Xbox rarely asks again.
Worth noticing
Saves live in the browser, and consoles forget. So progress can be written down as a short backup code, and the tables behind that code are append-only: a code written on paper months ago still restores the right stars after the game has grown.