Games

Clownerstrike is a multiplayer team game played from the first person perspective. Playing as a circus clown, it is your job to entertain the audience and make them laugh. In order to win the crowd, you and your teammates must perform a variety of tasks or stunts using objects and items found in an arena style circus tent. At the end of the time limit, whoever has achieved the highest laugh score will win the act (round). At the end of 5 acts, the audience determines a winner based on the combined scores.

Theory and Goal:

The goal of Clownerstrike is to create new and interesting forms of game play while broadening the perspective of the genre it resides in. In order to achieve this, Clownerstrike pulls both artistic and technical elements from current commercial games and fully implements them as the root of the game play experience. An example of this would be the specific use of a physics system that affects the goals of both the teams and individual players. Clownerstrike is truly original because it presents a unique arena gaming atmosphere with crowd interaction. It is this crowd interaction that steers the player and motivates them to win the game.

Process:

The initial idea was born through an exploration of alternative games. As this idea took hold, the concept was prototyped using pieces from children's board games that focused on dexterity as a form of game play. Using games like Ants in the Pants, Don't Spill the Beans and Jenga, a variety of concept sketches and level ideas were created on paper. After finishing this paper phase, a concept stage was formed using a game editor for a popular game engine that would later serve as the platform for the game. This concept stage focused on showing off the principles that would form the overall goal for each level and individual goals of the players. Forming two teams, one for concept art and one for engineering, the first level of the game was slowly pieced together. Each of the pieces of code the engineers developed was to be modular enough to plug into each of the levels for the finished product. The art team produced the desired characters and props for the game that were created first in 2D form and then translated into 3D using tools such as Maya that would also plug directly into the final product. Given the scope of the project, a single level was created to show off the intricate details between both the players and the audience as well as the players and their respective teams.

Composers: Jason Poss, Danita Ng-Poss
Engineers: Ben Moise, Glenn Song, Mac Phair, Garen Torikian, William Khoe, Andrew MacNamee, Taylor Fort
Artists: Erin Reynolds, Yoom Thawilvejakul, Mihai Peteau, Scott Arnold, Brad Newman, Brian Coffee