Rocket Wrestling Entertainment

Rocket Wrestling Entertainment is a First Person Movement Shooter that combine rocket jumping mechanics with the bombastic world of professional wrestling! Players are equipped with a Rocket Launcher and special abilities called Takedowns which they can combine to create flashy and brutal Knock Outs. Players earn points by knocking out opposing players, with flashier beatdowns earing more points. 

My role on the project was as it's creator, sole programmer, and lead designer. This was my first multiplayer game, and throughout working on RWE, I learned a great deal about coding for multiplayer solutions, and designing for player versus player gameplay where everyone in the instance needs to be able to have fun.

This balance is achieved by adding an ease of use to simply use a mechanic, but hard to properly chain them together to perform complex maneuvers. Performing a Rocket Jump into a Slide into a Jump into a Wall Kick to maneuver safely requires enough skill that it differentiates players who just picked up the game from players who have played many hours, while allowing players to still pick up the game without having experience and being able to use all those actions effectively.

RWE is just as much about the wrestling as it is the rocket jumping. Early on in development I realized that Rocket damage would dominate the game unless other options were better and more satisfying. Early Takedown Iterations were very weak and thus players ultimately spent more time pelting each other with rockets. It made the game lose it's charm and identity. Thus I made a decision to make Takedowns more powerful, and make shooting opponents weaker. This came in two waves; the actual balancing, and the scoring mechanics

To balance the Takedown's as a better damage option, I made them all easy to follow up on and gave them heavy damage or crowd control. This meant that hitting a single takedown directly onto another player would often be enough to leave them dead to any follow up damage, or leave the player in a position where they are easy to land a second takedown onto them. In either situation the Takedown sets up players for fast kills that can be hard to escape from once caught. In contrast, Rockets often required 2-3 direct hits to kill another player, and were hard to hit due to the travel time combined with player mobility. This is in addition to the fact that shooting other players means that the shooter is not rocket jumping, giving up the core mobility tool to do so. 

However Takedowns weren't just more consistent for burst damage; they also gave players more points! The game doesn't score based on raw Knockouts; it uses a point system. For each point of damage a player does, they will get points equal to that damage, scaled by the type of damage dealt. Rockets give 1x, Takedowns give 3x, and stage hazards give 5x.  This incentives players to go for risky takedowns to get a higher score versus taking an easy knockout that would only yield a few points. 

These changes yielded positive results in behavior, with players going for riskier plays to try and rack up points, especially when behind. This led players to focus on combo based gameplay and explore the potential synergy between abillities the game had to offer.

RWE is designed with symmetrical levels with hazards scattered throughout the level for players to use. This was done to make it easier to build art assets for the game while also keeping the levels simple and compact. Early on, the levels were designed with more space, but ultimately this was found to not be too fun as players often found themselves either searching for other players or struggling to confirm KO's due to it being too easy for players to escape each other.