Mush Match is a social deduction game type that I started back in 2018. Like many other social deduction games, it plays asymmetrically; the humans and the Mush have different goals and different tools to achieve them. Every person has only one life, and their team is identified on death.
Ever since then, it has been refined and reworked, and now is a fully playable and bot-compatible gametype. It is gradually expanding in its featuers, becoming more full-fledged with each larger update. Check the todo.adoc file in the GitHub for more info!
• Download:
Grab the latest release from GitHub!
• About
In the beginning of the match, "warm-up" begins for a brief moment, where everyone is in the human team and cannot be killed; once this ends, a fraction of people are selected at random to be Mush, which is unbeknownst to everyone... except other fellow Mush. And that's when the match truly begins. :)
There is one common aspect to each team's goal – it is to ensure that the other team does not have any living member left. The meanings and implications of this are still asymmetric, though, both in lore and in the methods available to each team.
It is playable in any Deathmatch level. Eventually, I plan on having it enhance existing levels with Mush-Match-specific props (more than just decorations!), such as security cameras and water balloon dispensers, and alternatively support DM-MM-... levels built specifically for Mush Match with open areas and tight corridors and stuff.
Mush Match was also written with bot support in mind. Bots are even able to gauge suspicious behaviour and engage people with the Suspicion Beacon. I also made sure that they didn't act "cheatily" by being able to tell who was mush or not mush ahead of time. Mush bots are less likely to band up with humans than other human bots – are more likely to act in an anti-social manner – and also know how to be sneaky when either killing or infecting. Which is to say, good luck spotting them, before they spot you!
For more details, please see the read-me under the file list in the GitHub page. It includes a FAQ and some more useful information :)
• Objectives:
• The humans' objective is to eliminate every Mush from the level.
In order to do this, their main task is social deduction.
There is a Beacon Launcher, which launches "beacons" that straps onto a person and marks to everyone in the match that this person has the suspicion beacon, as well as the name of the person who launched it. The Beacon denotes suspicion, not condemnation; generally used to mark someone who kills or damages someone else, or even acts in a generally suspicious manner (such as reclusion from other players). It is possible to have these suspicions lifted by killing someone who turns out to be a Mush.
• The Mush's objective is to either eliminate or infect every human.
In order to do this, it is possible to kill other humans; but this will
Note that Mush can also take damage from water! :)
Lore lore lore...
(a) communicate in a way only other Mush can detect (which explains how Mush know whether anyone else is a Mush or Human, unlike Humans who have to, well, deduce!);
(b) are able to produce spores, which can infect someone else and turn them into a Mush too (though in the original Mush game they require introspection into the bloodstream, or "spiking");
(c) may look and behave just like humans when not doing anything that is specifically only possible to Mush (such as taking damage from water or, in the case of Mush Match, holding the Sporifier, the mush weapon that can infect others).
They behave like a hivemind; this is why they are regarded as uncountable.
• Videos
Here's an assortment of videos about Mush Match. You are encouraged to make your own! Post a link to your Mush Match video in this thread and i'll put it here :D
Video video video
[youtube][/youtube]
From you:
(none yet)
Footnotes
¹ Build number differs from version. Build numbers are in the year-week-suffix format, akin to, for instance, Minecraft snapshot versions. Like in ISO week date, a week starts on Monday. Version numbers respect the Semantic Versioning standard.
² The planet is named Tamina, and the star Tau Ceti. This is lore out of the original Mush game. For more info, see the Mushpedia.