Roadent Rampage
Click the image above to see a game trailer
Roadent Rampage took place during the last five months at Full Sail University. The development schedule was broken down into a two month design and planning stage, and the final three months comprised the production of the game. This game was developed by a team of five individuals who were selected randomly from a class of sixteen. I played the role of Project Lead on this project; my responsibilities were to maintain open lines of communication, make sure each member remains on task, and be responsible for meeting project deadlines.
Technical Responsibilities
Game Framework
Resource Manager
Event System
Character Stackable State Machine
Artificial Intelligence for Single Player & bots
Navigation Meshes
Hamster Animations
Debug Tools
Team
From left: Jon Faugeaux, Tom Rader (top), Casey Flach (bottom), Michael Sigsbey
Level Concept
I drew all the concept art for the levels we designed. This top down view of the hamster cage level. This image was later used to model out the level in Maya as well as the Nav Mesh. Which was later refined by our artist.
Getting to know the team
Only having worked with Casey Flach before, most of us were unfamiliar with each other. In order to bring the team together I organized a small volleyball tourney. Originally I planned on getting the other teams in our studio involved, but sadly its hard to get Nerds organized for physical activity on a hot summer day.
Agile Development
During production the team met at my apartment where we began at 9 am sharp and performed a 10-15 minute review of everyone’s progress and what everyone plans to get done by the end of the day. Each task was intended to be completed with-in 8 hours, thereby seeing a constant flow of stickies and steady progress.
AI Architecture
The entire AI architecture for Roadent Rampage was developed in only three weeks. This included pathfinding, a very high level behavior tree that could navigate the level and shoot at the player, as well as a perception layer that kept track of game objects in the scene and performed periodic line of sight tests to avoid cheating.
Maya NavMesh Exporter
This is an MLL file I created for Maya 2008 in order to export my Navigation Mesh and load it as XML. Click here to download.