Introduction
In our sophomore year at DigiPen Institute of Technology I recall tossing ideas back and forth with my friend and teammate for the project, Thanh, about what would be an innovative and challenging game to create. We both agreed that the theme should incorporate water, as water contains many fascinating properties to simulate. It is beautiful to gaze upon, it has a life of its own, and there are still game ideas that have yet to take advantage of using water as their playfield.
Months later we gathered as a team and debated about ideas for our third year game that would be original, yet fun for us to play as well. Nintendo games were an obvious source of inspiration for this, and from their game Mario Kart, a fresh idea was born.
Barrel Rapids
The game is entitled Barrel Rapids, and it takes the idea of a constant sense of speed utilized primarily in snowboarding games and fuses it with the genre of combat racing, with the combat aspect being the focus for the player. This was done to force players to think and react quickly to the environment, all the while avoiding their opponents’ barrage of attacks. The idea to ride down barrels was developed from a conversation between my wife and myself as we were visiting the Niagara Falls. There we started to develop silly characters that we thought we be fun to play in this type of game. Later as a team, we narrowed the types of characters, as well as added new types that we thought would be most fitting for the game. We feel that the characters and zany theme play a crucial part in the fun experience provided by Barrel Rapids.
The game was developed for the PC and took approximately 9 months to develop. The engine and tools were all created by the members of the team using C++, Lua, Direct3D, FMOD, and 3DS MAX for the models.
The members of the team included the following programmers:
Pete Kugler – special education/technology teacher at Tillicum Middle School, designer, programmed animation system, game play, tools, particle system
Thanh Nguyen – international student from Vietnam, programmed the shaders and river, and provided great optimizations to the game
Brian Kircher - physics programmer from Colorado Springs, currently interning at Arkitek on educational game to help at-risk students
Chance Lyon – AI and game play programmer and strong advocate of Lua, currently interning at Zombie Games
Tyler Ernst – programmer at WestTek, responsible for the networking and menus
The team also consisted of three talented artists: Audrey Cox, Sara Eggers, and Bess Cothrum.
Barrel Rapids credits.
