Teaser
In Probee the athletes make heavy use of their surroundings in order to reach higher and score harder. Navigating the environment in a parkour-like fashion to find lucrative throwing spots while keeping an eye on the opponent is the core concept of the game. Work together in teams of 3 to stand victorious!
Description
Probee
A fast paced, team based arena game, in which the players control cybernetic athletes to measure their skills at Ultimate Frisbee and Parkour. But what is a state-of-the-art robot without their team? Strategically place yourself around the arena to catch your team’s passes. Catching a frisbee scores points according to how many targets have been hit during its flight no matter who threw it. This makes intercepting enemy shots a valid and valuable strategy.
Concept
We envisioned Intergalactic Frisbee to be a galaxy wide aired sports event watched by millions. The arenas are modified remnants of an old civilization called “Humans”. This serves an educational purpose of showing these relics to the entire galaxy and allows us to model after modern architecture. The athletes are special purpose built robot models to allow quick maneuvers, wall running around the map, throwing and even magnetically catching the frisbee.
Our concept phase was amidst the Covid pandemic, so we quickly settled for an online multiplayer game.
Implementation
As the core concept for this game is a multiplayer arena game, we chose the Unreal Engine as our engine of choice, with built in support for movement prediction and an already existing server/client model. We distribute our game on Steam, initially as an idea to overcome the pandemic induced necessity to keep a distance, but also as an easy tool for us to keep matchmaking simple, with the Steamworks API.
Additionally we integrated FMOD studios for our sound department to enable faster prototyping and modify the played sounds during the game based on match intensity and different events.
We are particularly emphasizing user experience to make this fast paced game as easy to play as we can. The Frisbees are highlighted through walls to never lose track and after throwing the predicted landing spot is visible to everyone to ease the movement in 3 dimensional space.
Team
We are a team of 7 students thrown together from MMT and MMA - three programmers, two audio artists and two 3D artists. As this is the first time for us to work so close with the other department, we are proud to present: Probee