Raid party is a local multiplayer partygame for 1-4 players. Players control one of the 4 souls of mighty legend; Octruls the famed fisherman, Khai the acclaimed adventurer, Luckas the man of legendary luck and Conerad the brutish builder.
Once every 500 years, the Lord selects one soul he deems worthy to ascend to godhood. This time however, he can't decide between these 4 souls. So, to decide who gets to become a god, a contest is held on the island of Limbo. The soul with most territory on the island at the end of the contest shall become a god!
I was the project lead and game designer, as well as the gameplay and AI programmer for the minigames during this project.
The game was nominated for the "Best idea" and "People's choice" awards at the Gameschool expo 2023.
The game consists of 1 game board and 4 minigames. In a round, each player rolls a die and moves along the game board while interacting with the spaces they pass. Some board spaces give money, some take money and some generate events that affect the board itself.
After each player has moved on the board, the game transitions into one of the minigames. Each minigame is built around a specific control scheme which makes them intuitive and easy to pick up and play. The minigame controls are also built in a way so that they can be easily expanded, so that adding new minigames is much faster and implements perfectly into the backend logic between the minigames and the board.
If the game is played with less than 4 players, the computer automatically fills up the remaining player slots with AI controlled players. That way, if a player wishes to play alone, they can play with only the computer as an opponent.
During this project, I was the AI and gameplay programmer for the minigames as well as the general game designer for the game.Â
Each minigame has its own controller which inherits from a base controller. These controllers are designed in a way to make it easy to create new minigames with the same control scheme, without having to rework the code that handles logic between the board and the minigames or making new controllers.
The AI players are made in a similar way, having nearly exactly the same code as the controllers. This keeps the minigame logic simple and easy to debug, since as long a player can play and win, so too can the AI.
As our team only had 2 programmers, and no artists, I took on the task of environment artist. We had purchased some low-poly assets by Synty studios through Humble Bundle, so the only artist task remaining was to actually place them out in the level. We recieved quite a lot of praise from playtesters who had tried the game before and after the environment update, and noticed players were more likely to play the game for longer.
Hans Ola Hoftun - Lead backend programmer, tool developer, gameplay and AI programmer for game board, game design
Kristian Whittle Stensland - Project lead, lead gameplay programmer, lead game designer, gameplay and AI programmer for minigames