Real Robot Rampage was a game that I co-led as a game designer and programmer for Georgia Tech's HackGT Hackathon. The constraints were that in just 36 hours you had to build some piece of software with a maximum team size of four. We found very early on that we were pretty much the only group with any sort of art background, as a majority of the other 1000+ participants were heavily focusing on engineering and computer science.

 

We used the Unreal Engine 4 to build a networked cooperative robot destruction game, with full art assets and animation in the allotted time. We essentially built a system where people who had the app on their phone could join over a wireless network to each control a different section of the robot, and the collective goal was to use the robot to destroy the city as quickly as possible before the fuel source ran out. Buildings were worth different point values, and using Unreal's fractured mesh tools it was easy enough to make the destruction of the procedural city very satisfying. 

 

To add a heightened level of confusion to the mix we built the camera system as a news helicopter that continuously circles the robot, displaying the player's user interface in a semi-logical way, but also creating a means by which players always had to figure out the proper direction to point their robot, as the controls were purposely set to world orientation rather than camera orientation.

 

We went on to be awarded Finalist at HackGT, and we thought we had a good chance to win. That was of course until the Dean of Georgia Tech's Robotics and Computer Science presented a keynote speech on how great robots are for humanity, and of course she was the head judge of the finalists. Regardless, we're very happy with the way Real Robot Rampage turned out, and we very much enjoyed the event.