The Floor Is Hacked!
The Floor Is Hacked is a fast-paced twin-stick arena shooter game that can be played locally with 2-4 players. It is the end result of the game projects course at Digital Arts and Entertainment. The goal was to go through the entire process of creating a game, from concept to polish in 3 months.
The Floor Is Hacked!
A fast-paced twin-stick arena shooter where you shoot the ground from under your opponent's feet and endeavor to be the last man standing!
Characters
Mechanics
The characters can move, shoot, jump and punch. There is also a ledge-grab that can save you from falling if you're fast enough.
Design
We opted for bobble head style characters and this is why we chose to only change the heads of the characters, to define which player is which.
We tried to keep the topics of the heads as close to the vaporwave aesthetic as possible, and we decided to have 5 colors in the character select to give the players freedom of choice.
Body model and Animations - Antijn van der Gun
Head models and Pointer - Geoffery Duqué
Iterating on the design
As you can see, we first intended for the characters to have an outline, but from a distance the characters became unreadable because of it, so we scrapped it.
In the end result we use a shader that creates a gradient in object space, from the front to the back of the character.
The Ammo
In a shooter, you can't go without dangerous projectiles of some kind.
We developed 3 bullet types for the project: a standard bullet, a bullet that splits into several smaller projectiles, and one that *freezes* a tile, cause the player walking over it to lose friction.
The models for the bullet were created by both Geoffrey and Valentijn, the code was taken care of by Gauthier and Catherine. The bullet particles - the trail and burst - were created by Geoffrey.
Each ammo type also has it's own unique pick up. The visuals for the pick-ups were kept simple and distinct, mainly by color. The visuals for the pick-ups were created by Valentijn, and the spawning system was programmed by Floris.
The Environment
The playing field, tiles, camera and backdrop went through many iterations. The main difficulty was making sure the focus was on the characters and the action, and not on what was happening to the side or in the back of the playing field.
Gauthier created the code for the generation of the playing field - all we had to do was plug in a mesh and fiddle with the offsets.
The dynamic camera system was programmed by Floris. It dollies backward to keep all the players in the field of view and can zoom in to certain degree if the are closer.
The tiles have a shader applied to them that creates a gradient from back to front, based on world space, created by Valentijn.
The Sweep, The Punch, and The Glitch-Out
And other particle effects
On top of the material Geoffrey created for when a tile is impacted by a bullet, causing this chromatic aberration effect, he also made it bob and twist within the blueprints making hitting a tile a satisfying event.
Antijn also created the particle effect that triggers when the player dies, clearly signalling to a player that they're out of the round.
And lastly a system created by Valentijn that triggers when a player is frozen.
User Interface
HUD
The HUD, created by Geoffrey and programmed by Gauthier, went through several iterations. One where there was a render target that updated the player head, ammo count and rounds won by streaming a texture from a blueprint. This turned out to be very bad for performance, so we then opted for regular old textures anyway.
Menus
We created a button indicator that indicates which button to press regardless of the type of controller. This graphic is also used to the ledge-grab prompt. Visuals created by Valentijn, functionality implemented by Gauthier.
Audio
The sound design of the game was in the care of Antijn and Geoffrey.
Geoffrey found the music for the game, all tracks by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio.
Antijn implemented all the other audio: Jumping, dying, punching... As well as the sounds for the buttons in the menus.
On The Scrap Heap
Starting out on the project we thought to implement an element on the player's backs that would serve as diegetic UI, displaying how much ammo a player had left. Due to the distance from the camera and a need to cut down on visual noise, we opted in the end to put an indicator in the HUD.
That's All, Folks!
The project was interesting challenge and for most of us a very first introduction to working as a team. While there is still room for refinement and expansion, we felt we made a game with a strong core that delivers what's on the package - short bursts of fun PvP chaos for an evening with friends.
We hope you found this breakdown interesting, and if you would like to learn more or play the build, check out the itch.io page.
Live long and Prosper,
Group 26, Out
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