Roadent Rampage
Posted 1 year, 8 months ago at 9:48 pm. Add a comment
Project Facts
- Converting student project prototype to XNA
- Eight Man Team
- 3D Networked, Multiplayer, 3rd person shooter
Current Responsibilities and Contributions as Lead Developer
- General Framework and Event System
- Moving Winsock to XNA’s networking while adding a significant amount of features
- Collision, Physics, Spatial Partitioning / Bounding Volume Hierarchy
- Asset Integration and Content Loading
- Vehicle Movement and Character System
- Shooting / 3d Picking (from the 3rd person)
- Power-up implementations
- Input Management
Overview
Roadent Rampage started off as a student project, but has evolved into a full fledge title in development for XBox 360 Indie Games. It is a game that is heavily inspired by the Twisted Metal series and our team took the vehicular arena combat aspect from it and put our own little twist on it to make it a lot more engaging and enjoyable. Instead of artillery packed roadsters, we decided that roadents inside hamsterballs with guns attached to the sides would be a fresher approach to the vehicle combat genre. The game retains the 3rd person view common in all Twisted Metal games, but you can now aim with crosshairs at other vehicles, making Roadent Rampage a truly unique “Rolling Turret 3rd Person Shooter”.
The level environments are relatively small, keeping the action fast paced and frequent. There are numerous power-ups (Missiles, Mines, Damage Shields, etc) scattered around the arenas. You can also select multiple characters complete with their own unique special attacks and varying stats. While rolling around creating carnage, you may eject your hamster out of hamsterball at any time in an effort to restore his destroyed vehicle. Ejecting from a vehicle isn’t always successful (IE: Ejecting into a wall or ground) and can prove fatal on numerous occasions.
In Roadent Rampage, the action never stops and I hope you have as much fun playing this game as we have developing/playing it.
Post/Current-Mortem :: /Project Narrative:
Overall, this project has been an outstanding learning experience for me and a pleasure to work on up to this point. There were numerous hiccups along the way related to initial technical design problems, but overall transitioning the project from the PC in C++ to XNA on the 360 in C# has been relatively smooth. It’s been very enjoyable refactoring our base technology to improve its design, and also clean up some stuff that was written way too quickly. Seeing the improvements in code maintainability as well as just over readability is very rewarding. We’re hoping the bolstered tech will act a solid foundation for upcoming titles post Roadent Rampage launch.
Whats going right:
One word. Gameplay. Our game is very fun to play. The original design of the unorthodox 3rd person shooter is as fun to play as we were hoping it would be during the design process. Our implementation is very close to the design we have on paper. When you pick up the game, it just feels smooth, right, and clean. This is probably a result of rigorous core gameplay testing on the PC prototype. Currently, we are hoping this level of polish on the core gameplay will transition easily to the XBox 360.
Current Struggles:
Currently, the hardest part about converting Roadent Rampage to the 360 is finding time to work on it. It’s hard to come home from writing code all day to write more code. However, it still gets done and progress is still being made, albeit slowly. My programming experience just continues to grow with every class I write and working in C# really helps put more visibility on having a stronger code architecture. There are numerous project risks (primarily the networking and getting it tested), but there are plans to mitigate the burden of network testing. Being in different locations makes it difficult to track team progress, but will also provide an advantage when testing the networking allowing for good real-world testing.
Screens
