DuolBots
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DuolBots is a co-op game where teams of 2 build and control a robot with fully customizable parts in a battle against another team. Beginning as a 2 semester long senior capstone project, DuolBots has been polished and is being released on Steam in July 2022 for free. Feel free to checkout our gameplay trailer below!
DuolBots was developed in the Unity Game Engine for PC. Art Models were created in Maya and textured in substance painter and ZBrush. The audio was imported using wwise, and the networking solution we used was mirror. Our network was originally written in MLAPI with Photon to support port forwarding, however, we made the choice to switch over to Mirror and use Steam's API so that players could easily host and join games with friends. The team consisted of 3 artists, 8 programmers, and 2 audio engineers.
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The Programmers were split into a UI/UX (User interface and experience) and a Gameplay division. ALONG WITH A NETWORKING TEAM WITH 1 MEMBER FROM EACH OF THESE DIVISIONS, THESE WERE THE GROUPS THAT WORKED TOGETHER TO DESIGN AND DEVELOPED THE MECHANICS FOR THE GAME. While the UI/UX team laid out each menu with the help of artists for design, the gameplay team created mechanics such as robot parts, movement, damage systems, and more. From there, the networking team would implment and test network functionality for each mechanic. After iterating through many sprints, the final product was delivered and presented at the SGX 2022 game expo.
The development process for DuolBots was very challenging and even more rewarding. For the most part, our difficulties fell into x categories: networking existing mechanics, avoiding information overload for players, and incorporating feedback from playtesting.
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To streamline the process, the team worked closely with our networking manager to establish best practices for actions such as instantiating and destroying objects so that race conditions are avoided. A race condition is when the order of operations matters (for example, checking the damage a projectile is supposed to deal when it hits a robot after that projectile has already been destroyed).
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The UI/UX team tirelessly re-designed and reformatted menus, tutorials, and visual indicators after each playtest. Their biggest challenge, however, was redeveloping the menus after some major features that were already implemented were cut. The biggest feature was fully customizable controls for every part unique to each player. In the end, the UI team found a balance between intuitive and informative UI displays which were easy to pick up and understand.