Objectives
Team River Run is a student team at the Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University, working with Intermediate Unit 1, Colonial Campus, creating a RPG style multiplayer mobile game – “Solidarity”, to help students overcome social and emotional difficulties, especially in the area of communication, through the power of teamwork.
Because students are struggling with the problems, Intermediate Unit 1 tried in many ways to help students get rid of them through variety of activities. Thus, we worked with IU1 to figure out a highly collaborative and fun game where students have to communicate and cooperate with one another in order to win in our game. More specifically, students not only need effective communication, but also have to trust, rely on and take care of one another.
In addition, we are trying to develop a long term playing experience. Students will have better performance in the game once their communication skills get promoted. What’s more, strategy is an important part of this game. Therefore, once they get experienced, they will have to think harder to obtain an even better performance.
Background Story
In the year 2200 AD, human discovered the ancient civilization underground pyramid in the moon. Five years later, human decode the technology from the discovered documents. With the technology, we can generate four energy crystals. With the combination of crystals, humans can harness the power they never imagined. And the technology helps them to emigrate to planets far from the solar system. Crystals not only act as the fuel for the interstellar spaceship, the space is always dangerous, humans equipped their fleets with crystal energy weapons and shields to defend themselves and protect innocent citizenships from asteroids and evil space pirates.
Game Features
Our game “Solidarity” uses the newest Unity 5.2 Game Engine.
We implemented three roles with unique gameplay. We used many gestures on iOS system in order to create extra fun.
We used its new networking core system and we implemented the whole networking structure on top of it all by ourselves, which supports an extremely important networking function – *RECONNECTION*.
We adopted its brand-new UI system, which helped us achieve many animation effects very easily.
We created 7 models and 10 kinds of visual effects (particle systems, shaders, lightings) to make our Sci-Fi environment believable and impressive. In addition, all this effects are highly customized and optimized in order to run on mobile device.
We designed a complete and balanced data system and score system. The data system enables the game to run in long term – the strength of players and enemies is well balanced according to players’ ranks and difficulty levels, such that players can always have different playing experience and challenges. The score system is fully tested to guarantee that every activity is assigned an appropriate score in a reasonable manner. Therefore, players’ player ability can be precisely reflected.