While studying in Montreal I participated in the Ubisoft Game Lab Competition in which teams of 8 compete to make a game over the course of 10 weeks based on a theme. Our theme this year was Generation and the mandate included cooperative online multiplayer, progression, and AI. Despite the cancelation of the competition due to the COVID-19 pandemic we kept working on our game Blackout and ended up with a really great final product.
Blackout is a two player networked puzzle game based on the concept of power generation. Players work together to return power to an arctic base before they freeze to death. They interact with a series of classic puzzle elements such as lifts and pressure plates to restore the flow of power. The game is easy to learn but hard to master. The puzzles, designed by the brilliant Greg Miller really make you think.
We were lucky to have three fabulous artists, Katrina Mason, Cameron Howell and Patrick Tennant working on this project as well as an amazing composer Cole Swany. Cole composed an original score for our game that he will be releasing in the coming weeks.
We decided to use Unreal for this project because we wanted to make a truly beautiful game. None of the programmers had used Unreal before, which made for a steep learning curb, but we got there eventually. The choice to use Unreal over Unity really paid off in the end and we got in a truly stunning final product.
I primarily worked on systems and gameplay programming. Initially, I was supposed to be the network programmer for this project but things rarely go as planned. Instead, lead programmer Avory Follet and Alex Wood ended up building our online multiplayer system while I worked on the camera and gameplay.
I may post some follow up posts talking in more technical details about the systems I build for this game.
Thanks to everyone on in Man Down Studios for their amazing hard work and commitment. Thanks to David Iooss for his leadership throughout this project.
You can download Blackout on Itch.io and view our code on GitHub.
