Mizzou Humans vs. Zombies (KnoopVsZombies)

Last updated May. 24, 2011 — read 2776 times

Humans vs. Zombies is a popular live-action persistent game of moderated tag, popularly played on college campuses. I have had the pleasure of participating in the game at Mizzou the last five or six semesters. The game has an “engine” component where players receive an automatically generated code and can report tags (ie., codes) through the engine.

Originally the moderator team at Mizzou used the Dormwire engine but quickly changed over to the official HvZSource source in the second semester the game was played. This held for two semesters before the cumbersome and manual nature of the engine caused me to write my own (subtly named KnoopVsZombies). The site is currently hosted at http://www.muzombies.org and has successfully ran two semester-games.

The engine offers several enhancements over the official engine. Namely,

Email verification
Online waivers
Identify verification (done using Facebook)
Deep Facebook integration
Facebook used as a publishing system
Account rollover between games (plus statistics)
Easier, fine grained moderator controls
Ability to send emails from the moderator panel directly
Orientations
User Approval As you can tell, the list is quite long (hence why I decided to build it in the first place)! Eventually I will open-source the code on Github but much of the code base needs to be abstracted away from “Mizzou” before that can happen. I will post a future update when it becomes available (several people have already expressed an interest in this).

Update: This project is now available on Github!