I recently attended IC Hack 17, Imperial College’s Department of Computing Society’s annual hackathon, where I and three others grouped together to create a game.
The general atmosphere at the event was great – the team had done a fantastic job of making Imperial’s campus feel like an event centre, and gratuitous amounts of plugs (for laptops!), posters, signs, and even a gigantic IC Hack logo projected onto the resident Queen’s Tower gave the venue a strong feeling of organisation and, for the briefest of times, I managed to suspend the belief that I was just sitting in a cafeteria.
The catering deserves a second, more thorough mention – whenever snacks were even remotely near running out, a brand new bunch would appear almost like magic (but perhaps some credit should also be given to the volunteers); not to mention the Domino’s, the dinners provided, and the breakfast of sausages in buns. (Hotdogs?)
In terms of my hack, to show for our 30+ sleepless hours, my team and I created a zombie shooting game which we rather imaginatively called “Zombie Hack,” in Unity with C#. It’s a classic wave-based zombie game, where the waves progressively get bigger and tougher, but with a twist – after you save up enough money, you can buy walls and towers.
The walls and towers would completely block the zombies, but they’re not outsmarted that easily – with some help from Unity (and our resident Unity expert, Marek Beseda), we added pretty awesome path-finding so they’d find their way to you; a bit like a tower defence game!
Unfortunately, as we suspected, playtesting showed a bit of a flaw in our strategy: players would build up towers and create an impenetrable square defence, meaning zombies just walk up to your defences and hang around until they get killed by them.
We initially decided to solve this by just making zombies damage structures, but a combination of zombies dying before they get close, and also some difficulties in making the pathfinding engine happy to walk into walls made this a difficult path. Instead, we created a new variant of zombies to complement the existing 7 (Stupid zombies who have low stats in general, Slow zombies which just walk a bit slowly, Normal zombies that are relatively balanced, Fast zombies who move faster than usual, Fighter zombies who move a tiny bit faster but do a lot more damage, tank zombies with tens of times more health, and boss zombies with loads of health, speed and damage), which got colloquially (and semi-officially) named kamikaze zombies. These zombies would spawn with other zombies in their wave, but had a special quirk: Unlike other zombies, who only chased the player, these zombies would raycast towards the player when they spawned.
If this raytrace hit the player, the zombies act normal, with the exception of them blowing up when they get close, immediately killing both themselves and the player. But, and the real quirk is here, if the raytrace hit a wall or tower, the zombies go into charge mode – they target that specific building the ray hit, 5x their speed, and charge at it. If they succeed (Which we found to be around 60-70% of the time), they spawn 2 more of this variant of zombie. This means that even structures made entirely of towers (Which we thought were slightly overpowered), eventually you’d get a few unlucky combinations of tank and kamikazes in a row, and before you know it there’s explosions on all sides of your base, and the towers quickly get overwhelmed.
We thought after this that the game-play was fairly exciting and balanced, and we were fairly excited to demo it to other participants and the judges. Whilst we didn’t win anything, it was great to see everyone’s reactions and even better to see how long we managed to keep some of the volunteers occupied!
On the topic of winning, I think it’s definitely worth a mention to the winning team in our category (games) – Karma, a horror game. You can see it here https://devpost.com/software/karma-lsyi81. The polish they managed to produce in just a weekend was incredible.
Another great submission I particularly liked, which unfortunately haven’t got a video or photographs on DevPost, called Emotional Rollercoaster, was a Kinect-based game where it would show you an expression name (such as disgust) and a photograph of someone (usually Trump or Clinton) making that expression, which you would then have to try to make. If you managed to convince the Microsoft API they then sent their data to, then you’d get some points – which were displayed in a pretty awesome fashion. They’d created a small roller-coaster in wood, with a car that drives forward a bit when you made the correct expression (varying based on how well) and went back if you didn’t. While their balancing seemed a little off – they had to hold the coaster car back to demo it sufficiently – that’s a pretty small issue and easy to fix, and it still looked pretty fun to play – I’m sure there’s a lot of untapped potential in analysing the expressions of players in a video game.
If you’d like to give my team’s game a go, you can clone it here https://github.com/MarekBeseda/ICHack. It was built for Unity, so you’ll need that too. I’ve built it for Windows users here: http://davies.me.uk/ZombieHackWin64.zip Let me know if you beat my high score of 32 waves! 🙂
High Scores:
Alberto Spina: 110 waves [I do not recommend attempting to beat this score if you want to achieve anything productive in your life]