RÅWKASS is a sound controlled multiplayer arcade game where you control a creature that can shoot laser beams out its mouth, and you do so by screaming into a microphone – the louder the scream, the bigger the beam. It was featured at Roskilde Festival 2013, the biggest music and culture festival in Northern Europe.
The game is for four players, with each player positioned at their own side of the horizontal screen. Each player controls a little creature called a Nibble using a microphone and a knob. As the player shouts into his microphone, a laser beam shoots out of the Nibble’s mouth. The Nibbles walk endlessly, but the player can control the direction they walk in by turning his knob. Players get points by staying alive as well as killing other nibbles. The player with the most points when the round is over, wins.
For each round, three different randomly chosen environments are played in. When played for a certain amount of time, each environment transitions into the next by falling apart. For instance, in an ice level, the ice will crack and reveal the environment below, which forces players to jump down. Furthermore, the environment is dynamic. In one environment, there is a crazy unicorn running around zapping players with its rainbow tail, and suddenly it creates a giant vortex that pulls the players into a new environment.
Context: 4th semester Media Technology (Medialogy) project
Finished: June, 2013
Time spent: 4 months, including research and report writing.
Total amount of programmers: 2
Software I used: Unity (C#), Pure Data, Arduino
Hardware used:
– 4 dynamic microphones from König Electronics
– 2 Roland Quad-Capture analog-to-digital converters
– 1 Arduino Leonardo
– 4 ACE Absolute Contact Encoders with 128 states
My areas:
- Gameplay programming:
- Laser beam code ( procedural mesh + damage system)
- Path and logic code for NPC
- Animation code
- Pure Data: Patch for measuring dB + reading it in Unity
- Arduino: Rotary encoder soldering + code for checking rotation
- Menu screen code
- Transition trigger code between levels
- Report writing
Credits
Philip Hundevad Nymann
Anne Juhler Hansen
Mathias Utne Kærholm Svendsen
Jon Aschberg
Kasper Urban Kajgaard
Benjamin Nicholas Overgaard
Roskilde Festival submission video (in Danish):
Råwkass at Roskilde Festival:
Benjamin Overgaard´s Game Portfolio 