Randy the Running Robot is an infinite running-style game that was created by Kenny Arentz, Nicholas D’agostino, Raymond E. Jones III, Tyler Martin, and Roger Salguero utilizing Unity software.
Randy the Running Robot is set in a dystopian future, where mutant indifferent green creatures (known as Stevies) chase innocent robots (known as Randys). As a Randy, the player seeks to outrun a Stevie all while evading flying missiles that plague the city.
Figure 1: Randy the Running Robot trailer.
Core Mechanics and Gameplay
The game starts with the player controlling a robot named Randy whose goal is to infinitely run away from an ever-chasing threat known as a Stevie while evading oncoming flying missiles. When first starting Randy the Running Robot, the player will notice that there are only two controls to learn in the game – [down arrow] to crouch-run and [up arrow] to jump and double jump. The player must use these controls evade the missiles and collect floating wrenches, which serve as “energy” for Randy to keep running away from the Stevie. If Randy goes too long without collecting a wrench, he will, unfortunately, slow down and get caught by the Stevie.
A score component was added to the game that is based on the distance Randy travels in-game, with the highest of these scores being saved as a “high score” and being displayed permanently on the “game over” screen.
Brainstorming and Development
The original concept of our original game revolved around the idea of creating a simple and fun game that focused on achieving a high score that other players could strive to beat. We wanted our target audience to be anyone who is looking for something mindless to play or to “kill time”, and the audience focus has remained constant through the whole development process. From Lazzaro’s four keys of fun, the concept of the game was directed towards “People Fun” in other words, we wanted a game where the player could gain amusement from the competition of gaining the ultimate high score [1]. Relative to Bartle’s Taxonomy of Player Types, we wanted the game to be geared towards the Achievers or those who have a competitive nature and enjoy the challenges and like to achieve the overall reward [2]. After having established the desired attributes of our game, we were able to successfully develop our initial pitch titled The Survival of Stevie Longlegs.
The Survival of Stevie Longlegs was our first game idea that was centered around a fun, lovable, long-legged green character shown in figure 2. The story of the game was based on the idea that our main character, Stevie, lived in a post-apocalyptic and dangerous world. Stevie’s objective was to escape and survive all of the world’s dangers, all while keeping a lovable smile on his face. We wanted the character to collect “power-ups” and dodge any projectiles or obstacles coming his way. Even though these ideas sounded great, we were limited to free use animations and had to figure out how to make a complete game with the resources we had at hand.
Figure 2: Stevie Longlegs
As the development process progressed, several changes were made to the game in an effort to keep the development process moving forward. The first of these changes was changing the main character from the beloved Stevie to a pre-fabricated robot sprite dubbed Randy shown in figure 2. The original, large green character had only one walking/running animation that was summarized into 49 different frames. In an effort to not get bogged down with developing the graphics, we swapped Stevie with Randy, which had 16 prefabricated running frames, 26 jumping frames, 27 death frames and 21 crouching frames for a total of 90 animation frames available. With the change of our main character, we decided to change the title from The Survival of Stevie Longlegs to Randy the Running Robot. Another change. Initially, there were plans for a health bar that would fill and empty based on time from last powerup and obstacles hit. The current version does not have a health bar but rather the character slows his speed to the left of the screen as the health decreases, getting closer and closer to the monster. Collecting wrenches restore the runner’s health and help him get back to the center of the screen. Even though we changed numerous things with our original idea, we still kept some of the features we incorporated in Stevie’s world. For example, the background of the game was kept the same, which is the frame of a city that sets the setting to a darker place. The ground was also kept to give the idea that Randy is running on a street sidewalk like you would see in a city. Lastly, the mechanics of the game were left unchanged for the most part, which led us to focus on the game balancing.
Figure 3: Randy the Running Robot
Another change that was implemented was the way in which the character’s heath was displayed. Initially, we wanted a health bar that would fill and empty based on time from which the last power-up was collected and the obstacles hit. In the final version, we decided to replace the static health bar with a system that would change the character’s speed so the player is more aware of the consequences of missing power-ups. If the player goes too long without collecting a wrench power-up, Randy will begin to slow down, bring him closer and closer to the Stevie from which he is running. Alternatively, collecting wrenches restore Randy’s health and help him get back to his original speed (which is indicated by his position in the center of the screen).
Even though we changed numerous things with our original idea, we still kept some of the features we incorporated in Stevie’s world. For example, the background of the game was kept the same, which is the frame of a city that sets the setting to a darker place. The ground was also kept to give the idea that Randy is running on a street sidewalk like you would see in a city. Lastly, the mechanics of the game were left unchanged for the most part, which led us to focus on the game balancing.
Balancing, Playtesting, and Bug Tracking
Balancing of the game is through steadily increasing the spawn rate of missiles. At top speed, the user barely has enough time to hit the ground after jumping before the next missile comes. The difficulty of this game has a fair amount of range to satisfy all competitive types of players and the high score system ensures players will keep striving to do better. The game does have some forgiveness with missing a wrench, but missing two in a row will mean getting caught by the monster indifferent Stevie. Overall the game feels difficult, but fair and is designed to be learned in minutes, but will take much longer to master.
The playtesting for Randy the Running Robot went surprisingly well. Team members and friends alike found it easy to learn and slightly addictive to play. Most of the bugs had been worked out through the previous iterations of the game. The process of finding bugs started with learning the nuances of coding in Unity/C# as the game progressed from ideas to actual implementation. After the game was wholly a game, we turned to friends and family to play the game with no instructions and we were able to observe some things about how intuitive the game was and how an outside game strategy can introduce certain bugs. One interesting problem that was found in playtesting was the ability to triple jump instead of the double jump when a missile was in contact with you. The timing had to be impeccable and occurrences were rare but occasionally Randy could glitch and jump through the roof. A little troubleshooting found the problem and a fix was implemented.
Future Work
The future of Randy and his adventures include learning how to expand to different game users with an ultimate goal of running on an iOS/Android platform. There are many issues that arise with introducing a new platform and may require some new control mechanics and catering to some different aspect ratios, but the base game has been fully designed and proved that the mechanics create a fun, addictive gaming environment to be enjoyed by almost anyone.
Acquired Skills
When the game first started its transformation from idea to implementation on the Unity platform we experienced a difficult initial learning curve. So much that by the time the game started to make the shape, a majority of the group was limited to conceptual contributions. Once certain areas were mastered, it simply wasn’t time efficient for everyone to get up to speed. A concept that took hours, in the beginning, took only minutes by the end. We also started to learn the limits of what we had available to us and started to make changes in order to continue moving forward at this time. We also learned some cool things we never thought we would be able to do like balancing aspects of missile spawns and making the game more fun with a health system and high scores. Overall, it takes a large time investment to learn the basics of Unity and would probably take years to master the rest of it, but with a solid basic fundamental understanding, we were able to create a fun and simple game in a relatively short amount of time with limited resources available.
Conclusion
Randy the Running Robot is a fun game that offers players a simple and easy way to have fun while giving them the challenge of improving his or her score or beating another player’s score. Where Randy runs to next is still too unknown, but he made it this far and has plenty of wrenches to fuel the way for his future adventures.
The designers of Randy the Running Robot have generously allowed free downloads of this game. To play this game follow the link and download the folder “Running Robot Game”. Once the file has been downloaded unzip the file and open RunningGame.exe. In the popup box check the window option and select play.
We as a group would also like to thank Dr. Mahoney for facilitating such a course and allowing for us to create such game.
References
[1] Marczewski – https://www.gamified.uk/2013/06/05/gamification-user-types-and-the-4-keys-2-fun/
[2] Kyatric – https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/articles/bartles-taxonomy-of-player-types-and-why-it-doesnt-apply-to-everything–gamedev-4173
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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