Problem
- Atlassian applications currently don't have any Easter Eggs
- It would be cool to have some
- Something like Space Invaders sounds like fun, with an Atlassian twist – you're attacking bugs, and trying to prevent the work from reaching your home. A good work-life balance is important! This is one of our excellent Atlassian maxims.
FedEx Delivery
I created an Adobe Flash project which uses all-Atlassian icons and graphics:
Game logic:
- Waves of bugs attack the player every 5 seconds
- Amount of bugs increases with each wave and are randomly distributed vertically
- Killed bugs turn into lots of tiny Confluence icons, which scatter across the screen.
Other notable features:
- Player character is the Atlassian mascot from Confluence
- Confluence-icon-shrapnel effect when an enemy bug is destroyed
- Text is fired in a rapid-fire stream at the enemy bugs
- Enemy "bugs" are represented by the JIRA issue-type icon
- Being code-heavy and vector-compressed, entire game is 17k.
End Game:
- Hilarious text-clipping issue on Mac OS X creates whimsical "GAME O" message when game is over.
Whats Left TODO To Get This To Ship
Formalising the package of the Flash assets into a Confluence plugin:
- Work out how to draw text from restricted pages and identify any security issues
- Setting up the macro to launch the game when a user types "bored" as a macro tag.
Distracted Atlassian User types the following:
Estimated time: One Week
Whats Left TODO To Perfect It
- Adding in some varied game logic would make it harder and more interesting — enemies with different behaviour, enemy projectiles, a 'boss' encounter. This is reasonably trivial, just a small matter of programming
- Fixing the text-clipping issues on the various menu screens (although "GAME O" was pretty funny!)
- 'Explosion' animation
- Correcting projectile impact checking to cull shots intra-frame update
- Perhaps changing text-shooting to fire entire words as a block so they are readable (currently backwards and single-lettered, spaces occasionally cause blanking). This also mitigates several 'unbeatable' player strategies that Atlassians discovered, related to the machine-gun rate of letter salvos.
Estimated time: One Week