Murderball [direct download link] was a senior project created and completed by a team of students at The Art Institute of California - San Francisco. The Senior Project class offers students three 11 week quarters to create a video game.
My name is John Miller. I acted as game designer, character artist and technical artist. I gave feedback to junior artists and dealt with solving a lot of the problems we ran into in the Unreal Development Kit (UDK). I worked closely with Dustin, our programmer finding and fixing bugs and gathering missing art assets. Jack Carr, Jesse Fischer and I are the original team.
My name is Jack Carr. I was the level designer for the project, it was my job to design and build the level and guide our environment artist through the process of creating assets for our game. I also served as a game designer in the early stages of the game.
Description
John - Murderball is a fast paced third person shooter/sports game hybrid, blending elements of older Unreal Tournament-style arcade shooters with bits of lacrosse and basketball. We really wanted to do something original but possible within time frame. We also wanted to support different play styles so we created a class system that lets the player pick a class that fits their play style.
The Runner has a 25 percent speed increase, so he is effective at grabbing the ball at the start of the game and moving it down field.
The Goalie is the only character to have armor. He spawns with more health but moves at a reduced speed.
The Interceptor has a triple jump that allows him to bound up and over objects that other players must run around making him excellent at retrieving the ball.
The Seeker can move around cloaked by invisibility. This allows him to move into position unnoticed. Maybe he takes out your ball carrier while he is alone; maybe he picks up a missed pass.
Goals
Create a game that has simple mechanics that can be easily picked up while still making the game interesting and fun in the long run.
John - We accomplished this by making the controls work like your everyday shooter: WASD to move, spacebar to jump. Left click shoots and right click zooms in. R will use the sneakers invisibility. We related the game to football/lacrosse and the idea of moving an object down field, this concept is easy to grasp and fun. Lastly visual cues give players an idea of where they are supposed to go.
Create a game that would encourage team work through scoring goals with the ball instead of encouraging a death match scenario.
Jack - The first thing we did in order to try and achieve this was to lower the damage of the assault rifle to a point were attempting to kill a player in a 1 vs. 1 situation was inefficient and it became much more efficient to stick with teammates to get kills. Once this was worked out the scoring of a goal became a much more important objective to the players than killing other opponents. The next step towards achieving this goal was through the level design.
By designing the level to direct the flow of play from goal to ball to goal and in each area of central play having little to no cover so that when fighting occurred it was over quickly and largely unrewarding compared to when a player scored the ball. In the areas between the three central points of play the level was designed to have narrow chutes that directed flow towards a central area at all times there for always showing the player either a goal or the ball spawn in front of them so that subconsciously once the overall objective of the game was stated and shown to them they would always feel the flow of the game/level leading them towards the ball or a goal.
To experiment with a power up system that would reward good play and discourage spawn camping.
John - This was one of the most fun and most original aspects of our game, I think. We created a system that had a player drop his unique mechanic on the ground when he died. Any other player could pick this mechanic up and use it for a limited amount of time. Some of the buffs stack very well together, i.e. double jumping and a speed boost or armor and a speed boost.
