Roman Rumble
Roman Rumble is the project I am currently working on as part of the Bachelor of Games and Interactive Environments (BGIE) capstone. In this game, the player must defeat waves of enemies in gladiator arena with inspiration from WWE fighting. What sets this game apart from other gladiator/survivor-like games is that the crowd in the arena is responsive and aids or challenges the player throughout gameplay.
The Team:
Designers - Sebastian Poutanen, Tom Fasham, Lachlan Sharman
Programmers - Hailey Graham, Peter Erbeni, Jack May
Artists - Parker Laansma, Yuxuan Zhou
As one of the programmers, I created several systems within Unreal Blueprints and C++ classes. These included the Interaction System, the Glory System and the Crowd System.
The interaction system allows items to be thrown into the arena from a point in the crowd. Once thrown in, the item can be collected by the player in the arena. Notably, the path that items can be thrown in is determined by a spline that designers can set. Throughout this project, I have endeavoured to make my systems customisable and understandable for the designers.
As for the glory and crowd system (see image left), the crowd is made up of a base c++ class (CrowdWorldSubsystem) which inherits from the Unreal WorldSubsystem class. This means that the properties in CrowdWorldSubsystem (such as the crowd excitement) can be accessed from any blueprint when the game is running. Then the crowd blueprint handles the visuals and state of the crowd based on the properties from the C++ class. The crowd's excitement level determines when items are thrown into the arena, how many coins the player receives and what gameplay abilities the player can use.
