Catastrophe
Catastrophe is a 2-50-player brawler, where cats try to bump each other off of buildings before an oncoming flood carries them away.
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I worked with a team of designers and refined the core concept into a working game over the course of four days.
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I was responsible for designing the dynamic levels that scale to accommodate any number of players. Buildings had to be added or removed as players joined and dropped.
I programmed the entire game, including the dynamic level system.
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Catastrophe was made for Sheridan College's Sprint Week game jam, and it won the jam! Afterwards, it was selected to be shown at Level Up Showcase 2017.
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Catastrophe was made in Unity, using HappyFunTimes.
Reaching the High Ground
Catastrophe is all about competing for space. You need to get on top of a building if you want to survive, but if too many people are on top of a building, it will collapse, leaving too little space for everyone to survive. Players are also on a very short timer, so they tend to panic and mess each other up while trying to survive. It's a lot of fun.
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The interesting thing is, Catastrophe isn't necessarily a competitive game, but players always end up competing. By design, there is always more than enough room for everyone at the start, but people always end up panicking and accidentally breaking a building, or knocking off a fellow player, and soon enough, it turns into a cycle of vengeance where no one is safe.
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I'd like to think that Catastrophe is a subtle commentary on human nature when it comes to co-operation in crisis. situations. I know I've learned a lot from it.
Infinite Players -- Dynamic Levels
HappyFunTimes is a framework that allows any number of players to connect to a game using their phone as a controller. With this as our medium, we wanted to make our game accommodate as many players as possible, and so, due to the nature of our game, the levels had to be dynamic.
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The main thing to consider was making sure there were always enough buildings for all the players to stand on. When it comes to the number of players, it was very easy to just change numbers in the code of the buildings, which dictate what their carrying capacity is. I just had to make it so each building can hold the number of players divided by the number of buildings.
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Next, I had to consider the physical amount of space per rooftop. If there are too many players and not enough space on buildings, they may have the capacity to not fall down, but the cats will not physically fit on top of them. So, I had to make it so buildings got added to the stage as more players got added.
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Tuning this dynamic level system was a delicate balance between adding buildings and increasing their capacity. There should always be much more surface area than needed, but just enough carrying capacity for all the players. Each level was tuned by hand to determine when each building would be added, and where.
Bumping
The initial concept for Catastrophe did not have much player interaction. The only way players affected each other was by causing buildings to fall down if too many of them stood on the same one. Together, the other designers and I found a solution.
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We thought we might give players the ability to punch, which seemed like a standard form of PvP conflict, but using HappyFunTimes, we were limited to a touch screen controller, and having two non-tactile buttons proved difficult to manage.
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Then, I tried just making the players bouncy. Whenever two players collide, they bounce off of each other. This eliminated the need for an extra button, and made the game far more dynamic, action-packed, vengeful, and fun.
