Rollerdrome

When I first joined Roll7, we had a simple trick system which had various flaws that the team wanted to address.

• Only supported single directional input + single button press combination
• Hard coded set of tricks, not so simple to add a new trick
• Only supported cardinal directions
• Animation for each trick were hard coded

We ended up deciding that we wanted the new trick system to allow multiple input sequences which pull off certain tricks instead, for example if the player wanted to pull off a Mute Grab, they'd press LEFT -> LEFT -> GRAB

At each input press, we do a process of elimination of which tricks quality, after more inputs, more tricks become disqualified. With proper setup a matching sequence will match from one of the remaining candidates and that trick will become triggered. Not only does the right combination have to match but also the next sequence press after the prvious one must occur within under a specific amount of time, specified in the trick duration, for example for left then left then grab, each press has to come within under hald a seocnd of each other.

I decided to have scriptables define each trick and their configuration would depict the input necessary to pull off that given trick. Allowing any designer to create or remove tricks at any given time and animators to plug in an animation trick pose in the scriptable. We were then able to quickly iterate over different kinds of tricks, huzzah!

We originally planned to have the campaign progression meta work in cups with each cup having certain limitations on the player to make things more challenging and unique for each cup. I had then come up with an idea where we would have a rule set system where each level definition would point to a list of rule sets that the level must adhere to. It would allow designers to select from a dropdown list in edit mode which kind of limitations we wanted. limitations ranged from limiting the player to certain weapons, having only certain enemy types spawn, having a countdown timer on the game mode, supporting free skate and so on. We eventualy decided on shifting over to a leagues progression meta where the only difference would either be enemy spawn types or the level environment itself so we limited the use of the rule set system to support just those features which still worked great but the tool I had created had so much potential! However, later down the road we eventually decided to have a New Game Plus mode and I knew this would be a great opportunity for the rule set tool to shine. All we needed to do was re-assign which levels would load in Level definition specific NG+ scriptables and assign different enemies to spawn and viola! This system was super easy to extend as I would only need to create new rules for designers to select. I still feel we could have pushed this tool further but it did the job and im happy for that!