Refining Scrum rules

If you follow Jocly activities, you will have noticed that we recently released our game developer interface. This interface has been primarily designed for HTML5 developers (Javascript, CSS, ...) to implement their own games or improve existing games. However, even if you are not a programmer, there are many things you can do just by tweaking  a few parameters in the game declaration. The fact the rules can be changed from the configuration depends on the implementation, some games are more hardcoded while some are very configurable.

Scrum is a Jocly game with very simple rules which has a configurable implementation: the size of the board (width and height) as well as the number and the initial position of the player pieces and ball can be easily modified and tested without any knowledge of development.

When I had the idea of Scrum, some 30 years ago, the material i had was a Mastermind board. This is why the game is played on a 5 rows by 12 columns field. Also, the initial players and ball position hasn't changed since the very first days of the game. This was a rough approximation of the position for a 7 players rugby team.

Other board sizes and players/ball initial position might lead to a more interesting game in terms of players experience. If you enjoy games and want to help improving Scrum, you can do so without knowledge of development.

Go to http://www.jocly.com/jocly/dev and sign-up as a developer.

Create a new project using Scrum as the base template.

From the developer menu (the triangle at the top right), you can verify immediately that you can run the unmodified game by picking "Run in lab"

Go back to your developer project and click Model in the left panel.

You can adjust the board size by changing the values of width and height within gameOptions.

In the same way, you can modify the position of the player pieces in gameOptions/initial/a (player A) and gameOptions/initial/b (player B) and gameOptions/initial/ball (for the ball). Position are entered as [ row, column ] where row and column start from 0.

Just make sure the players and ball position fit within the board size otherwise the game won't work.

Of course, if you are an artist, you can also replace the images within the project. If you do so, be sure you replace the original images with some of the same size.

Have fun tweaking Scrum.