Jonathan Puddicombe

This is the first of three game projects aiming to evoke feelings in the player that enable them to better appreciate concepts related to the Christian faith. This online mini-game was written in Javascript. The player is presented with a 3-by-3 sliding-square puzzle, without being told what it is, and without being given information about what the solution would look like. When the square is solved, space for an image of Jesus remains in the centre, and such an image fades in. A caption appears, "Jesus is the missing piece", along with a link to a video with more information.

The purpose of the puzzle was to use a simple mechanism to evoke a feeling of puzzlement as to what the "rules of the game" even were, and to whether there was even any meaningful game present, metaphorically alluding to the search for the meaning of life, experienced by many. Jesus being the missing piece alludes to the bible verse that states, "in him all things hold together". (Colossians 1:17).

Technical challenges to building this puzzle game included a lack of mathematical understanding of which initial configurations were solvable. This necessitated generating the initial configuration by a random step-by-step disordering of the solution configuration.

This is the second of the three Christian mini-game projects, and was also written in Javascript. It was intended to bring to life the concept described in Matthew 13:44, "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field."

The game involves the user pitting themselves against the game AI in a bidding war for fields on a limited budget. It is possible to privately peek at what is buried in each field, and its value. However this action costs money and one turn.

A particular challenge in building this game was to handle responsiveness to screen dimensions. The visual components were arranged on multiple layers, with each layer responding differently to changes in size and proportion of the screen, leading to undesirable occlusions. Future work might be to refactor the game to unify the responsive behaviour, as well as to create a tutorial.