ROLLING THUNDER
READY TO FEEL THE THUNDER?
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Rolling Thunder is a local multiplayer racing game in which the players control office workers rolling down a steep hill in their office chairs. The story of Rolling Thunder is that an overworked and underpaid office employee has finally had it with his dead end career, and decides to have some fun for once. He quits his job, buys a motorcycle helmet, and takes on the persona of "Thunder"; a street racer with the need for speed. Since motorcycles are a bit too expensive for him though, Thunder gets the next best thing to fuel his desire to race; his office chair.​
FACTS
Role
Game Designer
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Platform
PC
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Development Period
1/2018-5/2018
Responsibilities
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Level Design​
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QA
Engine
Unity
Team Members​
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Nils Steinbuegl (​Lead Programmer)
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Jack Malvey (Programmer)
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Thomas McGillicuddy​ ​(Programmer/Marketing Specialist)
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
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The core concept of the Rolling Thunder was to create a social experience that had the players competing with each other, but also laughing at the craziness of each race. Most of this comes from the fast-paced nature of the game, as each race is meant to be very short, but have so much going on that it feels like chaos. The players will attempt to roll down the track as fast as possible to reach the goal while avoiding obstacles and passing each other. If they happen to crash on their way to the goal, they can reset their character and start over. The first of them to reach this destination will be the winner.
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My main job working on Rolling Thunder was designing the tracks that the player would be racing on. I did this using Unity’s ProBuilder feature to visually construct the meshes for each level, and then test them as I was building them. Each level was constructed with the idea of focusing on unique obstacles that would only be seen in levels with their specific artistic theme. For example, one of the levels was called “Candy Canyon”, so the level was designed to display the obstacles that pertained to the theme, such as bouncing gum balls down the track and clouds of colored sugar dust.
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POST-MORTEM
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My biggest takeaways from working on Rolling Thunder include:
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LEVEL TESTING
Making sure that the level is not too easy or not too hard is extremely important to do, and certain testing should be done by the developer before QA Testing.
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DOCUMENTATION POLISH
Seeing how my teammates formatted their documentation made me realize that my previous documentation was not as appealing as it could be. Therefore, I strived very hard to make my documentation look much nicer.
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PRESENTING TO LARGE AUDIENCES
Rolling Thunder was able to showcase at PAX East 2018, and I was one of the few members of our team that went to present. The experience taught me a lot about how to effectively present a game to a large-scale audience and make them more inclined to play.