Revolution Arcade

2020

#C# #Unity #Arcade #GameJam

Team
Alessandro Profenna
Ethan Davis
Rui Fang
Kilian Johnson
Ash Reddick
Kai Zhuang

This is a 2-player competitive game where each player takes control of spaceships locked in combat over their solar system! The battle takes place along the systems rings and the first player to destroy the other 15 times is the victor!

Revolution was built over the course of a four day game jam, with the simple prompt of creating a classic-style arcade game. It was developed with C# in Unity and is playable on an arcade machine.
I worked as the lead programmer.

Design Process

We started with a lot of brainstorming to decide what makes a good arcade game and what core pillars our game should seek to have. From there we decided to cement these three pillars for our game: fast-paced, easy to understand, and competitive. After that we did some more brainstorming to land on a core mechanic to focus on. That ended up being players orbiting around a central point. We liked the idea of shooting bullets that could somehow come back and hit the player. This enabled the standard attack to be a balance of both risk and reward, forcing the player to make quick, strategic decisions. An iterative approach was taken to improve upon each version of the game, from the prototype to the final build. This required daily playtests with several in-depth questions.

Testing Controls

We decided to use the arcade machine’s joystick to control moving the spaceship in and out of the rings. The question became: how do we translate 8 discrete directional inputs into an in/out motion that feels intuitive to the player? We AB tested the two control schemes below and received mixed answers on which felt better. Most felt that B was more intuitive but that A was more predictable and consistent. After several tweaks, we decided to go with B, since it was easiest to grasp quickly.