In this year’s Game Programming Lab course the given theme of all games was „Historical places and events” and we had to come up with a game idea based on this theme. We choose the time of the American Prohibition as our historical background. The main characteristics of the gameplay should (and actually do) lead to a typical “pickup and play” arcade-game like experience.
Based on the chosen historical background, RumRunner is a car-chasing game where the main goal of the player is to make money by smuggling alcohol. For this purpose, there are pickup and delivery places distributed over the map. The player is rewarded for the successful delivery in form of a payout and a fuel bonus. The game ends when the player’s truck run out of fuel.
Since the government don’t like the smuggling activities of the player, the police will be after him. As soon as a police car spots the player’s truck with cargo on it, it will engage and try to stop him. Additionally, the spotting police car will call all other police cars within a certain range for assistance – which leads to more trouble for the player. This distance (the “calling all cars” distance) will be increased a bit every time a successful delivery is done. The player can get arrested by the police. This can be achieved when the police cars manage to be inside a (small) given range from the player’s vehicle and his speed is (nearly) zero for a given time. If you get “busted” this way, the penalty would be the lost of your cargo.
Upon delivery, the thankfull pub owner offers you a free drink. And as you can’t say no to a free drink, this increases the drunkenness of the player – which results in an “appropriate” graphic effect (double vision and wiggle of the complete image) and a very small impact on the steering. The drunkenness decreases on a steady rate.
The idea behind this is – apart from being a funny feature of course – that a fast pickup-delivery time will be in some sort punished. For example, if the player is lucky on the randomly chosen next points, he will have the handicap of the drunkenness effect. The drive to the next pickup point (and depending on the drunkenness perhaps also to the next delivery point) will be a bit harder.
Team Members
Thomas Siegrist, David Gerhard, Philipp Keller, Jonas Hauenstein
Thanks
First of all: Many thanks to the presentation audience for voting and making us the winner of the audience award!
We would also like to thank the other “CAB H57 Groups” (mainly OdysseusQuest, RedLight and Unstable Talent) for all the discussing, chatting, joking and inspiring time during this work-heavy semester course.
And last but not least a big “thank you” towards Jay, Jez, and Vas from Disney’s Black Rock Studio for your feedback and also for spending some time with us game youngsters at the bqm!
Game Trailer
Deliverables
This section covers the deliverables for the game class.
Some final comments from Jay, Jez, and Vas (added by Bob):
Simple but fun idea! Nice game!
The drunk-effect is nice --- much better then reversing the controls
The HUD could be improved to better show the amount of fuel left and convey a strong sense of urgency when fuel is low
The cop dynamics could be improved, since it seems fairly easy to escape them
The town design is overly subtle; it needs better landmarks and more color. One easy way to do this would be with billboard signs. You can find lots of signs from this period on the internet and could drop them in all over the city to help distinguish the buildings from each other while still remaining true to the era of the game
The game could be improved and made more interesting with different traffic patterns; perhaps some portions of the town have heavy traffic and, as you play and gain experience, you have pickup/dropoff locations in the high-traffic areas that are more difficult to navigate
Another addition would be moving targets -- for example, the pickup location could be a truck that's driving which you have to chase down
Alternatively, you could have a choice of several targets -- choose where you pickup or where you dropoff; this gives an element of skill to the game since you should choose the locations that are most advantageous