Old projects – Captain Commander Fort and the Lost Treasure (2017 Global Game Jam)

This is the game we ended up creating with ‘Waves’ as the main theme.

The concept was a multiplayer game where two or more people would compete to try and locate treasure hidden beneath the waves. We got our hands on a dll in order to use controller rumble as a makeshift radar that players would have to rely on in order to locate and collect invisible treasure that’d be placed at random around the map, with landmarks that could be used to pinpoint other player’s location and whirpools that functioned as warp points.

While in retrospective I’d say that forcing players to have two or more controllers in order to play the game wasn’t such a good idea, the gimmicks made for a relatively fun party game, and our planning was good enough that we managed to get all our planned features done (just!) before the deadline.

Tech-wise, I think learning how to use the rumble feature directly was nice, even though the way it worked was inconsistent among the controllers we had at hand. That kind of thing would probably be pretty bad news for anyone willing to bank heavily on rumble for PC games, where bootleg and third-party controllers being way more common than on consoles, and they tend to have inferior rumble systems, to the point that some of them had had way less sensibility than others and made the game a lot harder to play.