Highway Out of Hell
Technologies Used:
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Unity Engine
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Vs Code
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C#
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Jira
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Perforce
Itch Page:
Team project consists of 9 people and done in 4 weeks.
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My contribution is including but not limited to:
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Vehicle Movement
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Vehicle player Animation manager.
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Collectible items such as coins, shields.
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Event Manager.
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Control manager for both players.
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Networking using Unity's Netcode for Game Objects(NGO).
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Lobbies and Relays, including their Managers.
Details:
Highway Out of Hell is a couch co-op racing and puzzle game. It is intended as a short but intense couch co-op experience. As such its inspiration is heavily rooted in old flash games, which by nature provide burst fun experiences.
The inspirations for this game are Trackmania, Greek Mythology. This game was created from a given theme by Futuregames, which was symbiosis.
This project was developed in Unity by team of 9 people, and it has been done in 4 weeks, also it was part of Futuregames education. The present roles were designers, artists and programmers. Besides me there was one more programmer that worked on the project so my responsibilities were mainly programing but I have also helped with some game design aspects.
As a programmer, I most likely worked in almost every aspect of the game as long as it was related to source code, since we were making a co-op game I also wanted to add networking to the game using Unity's Netcode for Game Objects (NGO), but since we were only two programmers in this project and we had a very strict deadline of 4 weeks in total, this would have took considerable amount of time therefore the idea was scrapped in the end. However I want to focus on what I did for that since it this process thought me a lot.
Netcode for Game Objects (NGO)
Having net coding in a co-op game seemed natural so in order to have this I have worked with NGO, which was my first exposure to it. The first step was to have a vehicle that has network behavior, which is a child class of mono behavior and has additional networking properties. The rest of the code for the vehicle was nearly identical as the mono behavior one, only difference this allows me to work with a network manager.
At this stage, the only thing that network manager needed to know was the position of the vehicle, and since the vehicle was network behavior, it could easily get this and pass that information to other players in the game
What is my take on the project
During our weekly playtests, since this is a fast paced co-op game, the players rely on verbal communication too much in order to complete the game together. While it would be a neat idea to have online multiplayer, it would take us more to design around the communication part, like having VoIP or additional ways inside the game like players giving each other signs or so. And since we have a very limited time, in total of 4 weeks and having a minimum viable product (MVP) is more important than having an unfinished feature in the game, this felt like over scoping, therefore we scrapped the networking idea.