When our team convened on Monday we found our game in a stable and submittable state. All it needed was a small amount of polish and we had finished. But we had so many more ideas and desirable content we agreed to add only if there was time, and there was plenty of time. So we each came up with different things we each wanted to work on. I used the car horn asset I had made the week prior to create a system where if an oncoming car was on course to hit the player, they would hit their horn and play that clip. This was done with a short ray-cast from the player, which would check which side of the road the car was on. I chose to do it that way because I believed it would be less intensive for the game than ray-casts coming from all of the cars.
For our lane switching system, the player’s car is “hanging” from an invisible anchor using the gravity system in Unity. This allows us to just move the anchor from side to side and the player’s car will turn and wobble into position behind the anchor. This meant giving the player’s car a rigidbody, as well as all of the obstacle cars that the player dodges, since they fall with gravity, but with different start velocities. I noticed during play testing that the way the cars hit the player car resulted in bouncing and spinning for a very short amount of time before the game ends. I wanted to see what the game would look like if the player couldn’t die, and instead crash into the cars and send them spinning. So I created a boolean in our game manager that tracked whether or not the player was in this special mode, which I called “Rampage Mode”. I then edited the script further down to not end the game if rampage mode was enabled. This wasn’t quite perfect nor future proof, so I moved it to the player controller script, which allowed us to preserve the game ending function. Lastly I needed a way to enable this so called “Rampage Mode”. I decided it was fitting to have an invisible and secret button over the top of my name in the credits which would enable it. Next came testing. I started the game and enabled rampage mode, before hitting play. As I slammed into the first oncoming car it was quite satisfying as it bounced of me and up the screen towards where more cars were had spawned. I had created a huge wreck which spun off screen allowing more cars to come down and be hit. After playing this mode for about 5 minutes, we all agreed it should go onto a tablet build and be tested by other teams in the class. Everyone loved it.
The saga continued on Thursday when Isaac had the brilliant idea of making Rampage Mode a power-up. Since I had made a simple function that toggled it in the game controller it could be done from anywhere. After a tweak to the spawning system and a new animation for the rampage mode pick up, we had a power up. Although rare, rampage mode gives the player a satisfying break from dodging cars and allows them to plow through the traffic with a huge smile on their face. We added some UI that indicated when the mode is enabled, and made it flash when it was about to run out. Although this was an unplanned feature for our game, I believe it made our game something a bit more special than what it would have been.
I project management system was well applied for this sort of project. We had a series of short sprints, managed by Ken, who would regularly brief us on what was next, either in person or through Slack/Discord. Although we struggled to avoid feature creep, I think we kept our scope reasonable. There was nothing about our project that went especially wrong, and our risk management of planning to finish a week early benefited us with what felt like a whole extra week of development.