Wave Raiders: A ship battle game

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Overview

Two ships battle on water, in the air, and in space. Programmer for VGDC UCI’s 2017 Winter Game Jam as a part of the Wave Raiders team.

Jan. 2017
Wave programming, wave generation tools, debugging.

Github – https://github.com/tkwon09/GGJ2017
GGJ2017 – http://globalgamejam.org/2017/games/wave-raiders

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WIP!

Introduction

Wave Raiders is a game made for Global Game Jam 2017. The goal is destroy your opponent’s ship while navigating the treacherous waves, following the theme “waves”. I worked on generating the waves as a part of the Wave Raiders team. Chris Peterson came up with the original concept. Dylan Cockerham devised most of the mechanics and balancing as well as some stellar particle work. You can see more of his work here: https://dylancockerham.wordpress.com/

Simulation or Game?

Started with wave simulations using the same algorithm from Fish Out of Water. Resulted in a very finicky, but more physically accurate, wave generation. Was very difficult to use gameplay-wise.

Wave Functions

Next attempt was simple traveling waves using parameterized sinusoidal functions. More predictable, easier for players to understand, and actually looked quite nice. Used various physics websites to refresh my memory. Added parameters to create randomly generated single waves, frequency, and their various parameters such as amplitude, wavelength, etc. Needed to do tricky stuff to limit them to a single wavelength. Fortunately, all my digital signal processing classes made me very familiar with properties of wave functions, so it didn’t take long to figure out how to do what I wanted.

Conclusion

Most of my contribution afterwards was play-testing and debugging. I also spent most of the extra time to independently develop a second game: Hey Guys.

Nice to do some purely mathematical stuff with sinusoidal functions.