Redneck Rumble
About
Redneck Rumble is a 3D local multiplayer action-arcade racer game for PC, in which the players need to adapt to regularly changing environmental conditions, score systems, and abilities to win the game. The polished prototype of the game is published on itch.io and is playable with four players and four gamepads.
The development took place in a collaboration with three other students over four months. It was made for the final game development project in the study program of Game Engineering and Simulation Technology at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien. Moreover, external artists provided the astonishing in-game art and sound which gives the game its beautiful look.
The idea behind Redneck Rumble was to develop an electrifying local-multiplayer game such as those addictive local-multiplayer games back in the day. With Redneck Rumble, we established precisely that electrifying, addictive and moreover, fun gameplay. The game itself takes place in an arena of death in which two teams are in a battle with each other. Furthermore, each player has available unique vehicle abilities, and each side tries to get as many points as possible to win the game. BUT, as already mentioned, there are uncontrollable and unforeseeable circumstances which affect the arena of death, every player, and the environment. These circumstances lead to complete chaos between the players and emerge in the craziest gameplay ever seen in the last decades!
Work
As already mentioned, the game was developed within four months of work which implicates that the whole project idea was a team effort and different tasks were often solved as a group. Nevertheless, every one had his special field of interest and responsibilities.
The fact that I had the most experience with project management, promoted me to project coordinator and manager of the team. So I was responsible for creating the Game Design Document, development timeline, and set up the project management tool. Furthermore, weekly meetings, milestones and tasks were created and established to secure the project’s completion on time, playtests were established and implemented, and also general quality assurance was part of the agenda.
As I was quite confident with with the game engine of our choice, I worked alongside our lead programmer of the team. I was responsible for preparing reusable core mechanics and architecture as well as level design and setting up a knowledge base for the team.
Team
Following list describes the main responsibilities of each team member but does not reflect the full workload accomplished by each one of them. In general, the game design, game balancing, playtests, and quality assurance were realized within the whole core team, excluding the external team.
Core Team
- Bernhard Rieder Prototyping, Lead Programmer, core mechanics and gameplay, vehicle physics
- Viktor Was: General programmer
- Roman Winkler: UI programmer
External Team
- Artists: Piotr Dyderski, Constantin Naschitz, Jacqueline Reiter, and Jessica Stoimaier
- Sound Designers: Christoph Kremsmayr and Jan Schneider
Used Software and Technology
- Game engine: Unreal Engine 4.18
- Programming language: C++
- Project management tool: Hack’n’Plan
- Source control: AWS with Perforce
- Other tools: Resharper