Riding Shotgun
Just you two, the road, and forty-thousand demons in this thrilling arcade experience.
Roles: Game Designer, Programmer.
Tools used: Unity, Google Drive, Jira.
Group project – 6 members, including me.
Riding Shotgun is a game we're currently working on as our capstone project for our final year at Sheridan College. It's a co-op arcade car combat game that uses alternative controllers. One player drives with a steering wheel and the other shoots with a light gun, working together to cross the Mojave and mow through hordes of relentless demons.
Roles
Game Designer
I'm acting as the lead designer for the game's co-op elements. It's important that players not only rely on each other, but also interact with each other and feel connected, so I proposed a single-screen approach, power-ups for each player that could only be acquired by their partner, and a mechanic where the driver speeds up the shooter's reload with a press of a button. I've also designed almost all of the power-ups themselves, both for the shooter and the driver. I made sure to focus the driver's power-ups on different kinds of defense, while the shooter's focused on different kinds of offence. For this project, I'm using a new method of communicating design ideas, in the form of design proposal presentations. Instead of just throwing ideas without thought, this format lets me walk through my thought process, elaborating on them with mock-up scenarios, explaining potential issues that might arise and solutions I had for them, and inviting everyone else to chime in with their own ideas, especially if I don't have one.
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Challenges
Designing co-op mechanics that force players to communicate in a hectic environment when they share the same screen and have access to the same information has been very difficult. I designed dozens of mechanics and systems meant to incentivize or force player communication that ended up being scrapped because players found them annoying, or they were to complex for an easy to pick up arcade game. This only became more difficult as development progressed and we had less and less resources to spare on implementing new mechanics.
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As one of the two lead programmers, I was in charge of implementing the shooting mechanics and controls, including how they interacted with the light gun. Due to a quirk of how it worked, the reticle was constantly jittering around, so I had to program a system to suppress the jitter so players could aim better. Additionally, we wanted to take advantage of the light gun's built-in recoil haptics, so I had to program the shooting to interface with it, and not only send signals to trigger the recoil, but also trigger different types of recoil depending on if you were shooting a semi-automatic
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Additional Material
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