Griffin's Blog

Dev Blog Rag of the Hill

Background:

One of the ideas to come out of our discussion, when moving onto Workshop II, was to make RagBall a party pack. And so the idea of Rag of the Hill was born to serve as one of our game modes in this party pack. The issue with that, the game needed to be refactored. After patiently waiting for the game to be refactored by our amazing programers I finally got the chance to start working on the game mode by myself.

I jumped onto the idea of working on this game mode quickly as I was unhappy working on the menus. But when it finally game time to actually start working on the game mode I realized I had absolutely no clue on how the game actually worked. Coming from A Trebled Man where I know what each aspect of that game did, it was a bit of a shock. Even to this day I feel like I have absolutely no clue how the player script even works. But, nonetheless, I jumped straight into Rag of the Hill.

Development:

My starting point for Rag of the Hill was just taking one of the ragdolls and messing around with it. This helped me get more familiar with the project and got me ready for starting to work on the project.

For my portion of this project I like to say that I “scouted ahead”. Because there were no dev resources at the start of Rag of the Hill. So I went through and set up all of the logic to make sure that the game would work. The issue with that, was that a lot of things that I needed were still changing, especially the player prefab. So I would occasionally have to go back and change my work to make sure it worked with the most recent changes.

The main portion of the project I worked on was setting up the scoring zones. These zones would detect which player was in them and how long they would need to be in to reward them points. Obviously this code was not the most amazing code ever and needed to be fixed later down the line.

After that was all set up I had Conner help me with the more complex programming to make sure that it better fit the rest of the project. While this was happening several artists were making models and textures to help populate the scene.

From there, Conner and I worked together putting the finishing touches on the scene making sure that it hooked up with the menus and made sure that the game spawned four unique players.

Conclusion:

I am happy to see the outcome of Rag of the Hill and it was a lot of fun watching it grow. Especially because I would step away for a couple of days and I would see all of the new things that the other team members would add. I’m glad to see this game mode be as fun as Rag Ball and works to compliment the idea that Rag Ball is a party pack.

I wish that we were able to expand more into the different game mode ideas that the team had. I think this would have made Rag Ball an even better experience and even more like a party pack. But, I understand that we did not have the time or the resources to actually work on them.