MekaMon: Skirmish

Description

Skirmish is a battle mode that allows up to four players to engage in real life robot battles. Infrared transceivers are used to approximate the position of robots relative to one another to allow these battles to be fought.

The first version of skirmish was built around the idea of a collectable card game. I worked with another programmer and an artist to build the initial version of this game mode.

Each player could create a deck of abilities—known as augs—which were drawn periodically and could affect the course of the game by applying various modifiers. These decks were stored remotely and could be modified outside of the actual game to allow players to tailor a deck to suit their play-style. Custom animations were generated and stored on the robot to represent each ability and game mechanics and sound were synchronised with these physical animations to enhance game feel.

I also built a progression system so that from successive wins players could build our currency—MekaCoins—with which they could purchase attribute upgrades to further enchance and customise their experience, all seamlessly integrated with our RESTful web back-end: MekaCentral.

With the second version of skirmish we decided to try something different. We wanted to reduce the time a player spent looking at their phone instead of their robot. Joysticks were adapted to handle both movement and firing. Decks were dropped in favour of predefined loadouts, with each loadout having a specific theme (e.g. healer, dps, buffer etc) in the form of a few custom special abilities. I was responsible for rebuilding the network architecture for the redesign of this mode and for developing and refining many of the game play mechanics. I also built an online global leaderboard so that players could track their progress against their friends.

Key Technologies

Unity | C# | Networking