Machine Multiplayer Office (aka MMO) is a goofy social deduction game for 4-6 players in which a healthy outsider has to mimic the symptoms of sick employees in order to blend in and be the last one standing. Foreign robots have infiltrated The Hole Company’s hallowed office grounds, causing hardware malfunctions in our tireless employees and leading to eventual self-destruction!

You play as one of the two roles:

• Machine – The regular worker at The Hole Company, due to the infiltrators’ presence they have started to develop different symptoms (impairments in vision, controls, and motorics). They have to find who the healthy infiltrator is and eliminate them.
• Infiltrator – A foreign spy whose presence has triggered the company’s self-destruction protocol, but their identity remains unknown. Even though they don’t experience the symptoms, unlike the Machines, they have to act as if they have them in order to blend in and convince others of their innocence.

Each round, you vote for a new CEO, a person with the ultimate power, who is given a gun, ahem, remote control and has the ability to “switch off” any player during their tenure. The players have to choose the CEO carefully by observing and concluding who is the safest player to vote for. The game ends either when all Machines are kicked out, all Infiltrators are kicked out, or the self-destruction protocol has been triggered after a certain number of rounds.

When it comes to my responsibilities, I first started off with programming the core gameplay loop, which consisted of three main stages:

Downtime → Voting for new CEO → Testing Period → Repeat

After that, I made a role randomization system to assign roles to everyone at the start of the game and the different symptoms the Machines can catch. Then there was the work of synchronizing everything that was meant to be server-side rather than client-side, including but not limited to the players’ positions, chosen symptom for each round, the player voted for to be the new CEO, and object positions.