THE FOURTH PROJECT: games with unusual input

The game can be played downloaded and played from this itch.io page.

“In a distant future, robot animals populate the remains of old industrials areas. They are now clunky and rusty, and many are missing some gears in their heads… Help them fight each others in the arena over the few cogs left.”

This was a team project design towards the end of my second semester. It was another Unity project, and this time I was kind-of-sort-of the lead programmer, though that role was very more nominal. About half the code in this game was written by me, and in Unity fashion, it was again written in C#.

The goal of this project was to create an arcade game with an unusual input, and the project I ended up working for centred around a game where you race through an arena by slapping your own butt!

Most of my work on this project related around menuing, scene transitions, and the score system. I also wrote the script for character and level selection, something I had to rewrite more than once due to design goal changes within the team. I also wrote the script for one of the power-ups, spawning of power-ups, and the sprite updates for rotation.

It was a pretty whimsical game, and while it was a fun concept, the act of slapping your own butt for minutes at the time, having to do it rapidly to course-correct or speed up, was very tiring. The game can be played via browser using a keyboard as well, since the input from the butt-pads were directly programmed via a card to normal keyboard presses.

Originally the game was supposed to be a racing game along a track, and featured code for counting players and spawning cameras that would follow each player as they moved along the track. When it became clear to us that most players would only ever play this game once on a showroom floor, so they would not have time to learn both the track, and the controls, we settled on an arena fighter instead. I had to delete two weeks of work because of that, haha!

In the end, I am pretty satisfied with this game, though I don’t think I’ll revisit it anytime in the future.