The game simulates a fictional coronavirus outbreak on a continent divided between six nations. Teams of students and stakeholders each act as a nation’s government and try to contain and eliminate the pandemic over a number of turns, while keeping their country socially, economically and politically stable.

They can aid their neighbors or harm them, and donate to a Global Health Organization.

Prototype and architecture. I built the first playable pieces: the game screen prototype, the turn timer, a new UI mockup, and the chat prototype that grew into the inter-team chat. I then structured the game around models, views and controllers for the clients, the server and each country, separating what the server owns from what each client displays.

The server runs the game flow and owns the turn clock, and it only ends a turn once every player has confirmed. Until a player confirms, everything on their screen is theirs to change. Confirming sends their choices to everyone.

Core rules. I implemented the turn and spending system with the correct order of operations, policies, emergency loans, vaccination, aid between countries, popularity, and donations to the Global Health Organization with a progressive global cost and a reset. My client and I replaced the original calculations with simpler, more direct ones that were easier to follow and test, starting with the disease stats in the pandemic model those rules feed into.

Multiplayer that holds up in a real classroom. I fixed the server’s player count per country, and a bug that stopped a third player from joining: the Relay allocation was still sized by a prototype constant of two players instead of the room’s real player count. I also gave clients the right write permissions, and added safe disconnection and client reconnection that restores each player’s local policies. Clients now disconnect cleanly when the host leaves, the packet queue limit is higher, and the create and join buttons lock while a session loads.

Reconnection for players on unstable Wi-Fi is one of the features the client highlights.

Game setup. I built the initial game settings screen and wired every field to the game’s variables. Before a session starts, the host can tune each nation’s infection rate, population, ICU capacity and popularity, along with the vaccination rate, when vaccines arrive, and how long each turn lasts.

News and the rest of the interface. I built the news popup that reports on the outbreak as the game goes on, along with the main menu, the policy screens and a policy details popup, the pause, reset and emergency buttons, and the onboarding screens.

Results for the debrief. I built the end-of-game results: graphs of infections, deaths, ICU usage, vaccination and popularity, with filters to show one nation or all of them. The client uses them for post-round debriefing.

I also built the report screen, which breaks down every policy each nation took, what it donated to the Global Health Organization, and what it gave to other nations, so the group can talk through who cooperated and who didn’t.