Demolition
Zone
September 2018 - Two Bit Circus - Midway
Game
Grab the
wrecking ball and throw it at the building
to cause damage to the building and score
points. Hit powerups like explosive charges
to blast out entire floors, or wrenches to
repair your opponent's building. Watch out
for wildlife and other demolition workers:
Hitting them will cost you points. And keep
your feet planted, because each time you hit
the building you will feel the ground
beneath you shake with our force-feedback
rumble floors.
I wrote most of the game code, including
Unity C# scripts for the players, collision
physics, gameflow, and scoring. I even
designed and implemented a procedural level
creation system to randomly arrange
pre-built building floors from level
designers into a full, random skyscraper
that is unique each game. That also includes
building tools in Unity for designers to
create the level chunks with.
I also wrote some hardware communication systems.
First, we have force-feedback rumble floors that
shake every time a building is hit with
appropriate levels of intensity based on the
damage done. I used Unity's 5.1 surround output to
control and direct audio output to subwoofers
bolted to the player stall positions to make this
work.
As for ball detection, we have a sensor program I
helped write in Open Frameworks and C++ that reads
data from a LIDAR sensor and then outputs that to
the game via OSC. Honestly, the hardest part of
this was just getting Open Frameworks to run on
Windows.
Last, I wrote automated scripts that are capable
of playing the game at speeds significantly faster
than human testers as a way for QA to run
overnight tests to hunt for tricky bugs like
memory leaks.
...Oh, and I make a cameo in the attract mode
video. ;)
Check out actor Jack Black playing the game with his son!