Rock Paper Swap

Chillennium is the largest student-run game jam in the world, organized by students, for students. Hosted annually by the Department of Visualization, Chillennium is founded, staffed, and organized by students of Texas A&M University.

Overview

Game Design

The Intended Experience

We wanted our players to experience a strategic game where you could transform into rock, paper or scissors. With the ability to trick other players we were close to our intended experience.

We had an issue with the dash mechanic that we thought would speed up game play .Although it increased the game play sessions it also removed strategy as a side effect. This side effect occurred because when players were given the option to transform or dash they would usually choose to run away or chase.

The dash mechanic ended up making players just play a game a tag and had them spamming the dash button rather than try to read their opponents.

In the end we decided that the dash mechanic was not the part of the experience we wanted the player to take away, so we removed the dash mechanic.

Systems Programmer

Creating the Game Loop

I was tasked with creating the game loop and some core features.

For the game loop to work I had to create a way for players to win but we also didn’t want players to play for too long.

The solution we thought up was to have a point-timer win state hybrid. This means that you could win in two ways the first being if a player has reached the target amount of points while the second way to win would be to have the most points after about a minute.

This constraint the play time and allowed for others to play without waiting too long and it didn’t delay players who were doing well to waiting the time out.

Core Features

After game loop comes the fighting, I needed to populate the functionality of the game.

I was tasked with creating the player movement, re spawning, animation integration, fighting and death mechanics.