Game Life Cycle

Each Game is made a succession of events, from an Admin creating a Batch to players going through Rounds and Stages. Some of those events trigger callbacks that can be implemented by the Game designer. This document attempts to clarify the ordering and timing of these events.

Once enough players have completed the intro steps to start a game, Empirica will call the gameInit callback to setup the Game parameters (rounds, stages, any initial setup).

Once the Game has been created and saved into the database, onGameStart is called, allowing the Game developer to make the final preparations before the game. Any pre-game preparations can be done in either gameInit or onGameStart interchangeably. It might make sense to the Game designer to split the overall mandatory Game configuration (Rounds and Stages) in gameInit, from data initialization (using set on Game, Players, Rounds and Stages objects) in onGameStart, but it is not required.

Before the first round start, onRoundStart is called, then onStageStart. The Stage is then presented to the Players. When the Stage ends, onStageEnd is called, and when the Round ends onRoundEnd.

For subsequent Rounds and Stages, the Rounds and Stages callbacks are called as expected in a similar fashion.

Finally, when the last Round ends, after the end of Stage and Round callbacks are triggered, the onGameEnd callback is called.

After which, the player goes through the exit steps.

The list of callbacks goes as follows in order:

• gameInit Required

• onGameStart

• onRoundStart Repeated for each Round

• onStageStart Repeated for each Stage

• onStageEnd Repeated for each Stage

• onRoundEnd Repeated for each Round

• onGameEnd