Chaos City is the first rapid prototype I created as a student at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA). My team for this prototype consisted of John Wolverton (producer), Daniel Fischbach (producer), Michael MacLeod (producer), Trey Sharp (artist), Matt Watkins (programmer) and myself. Chaos City was created using Flash and Actionscript 3.0 and was developed in thirteen days.
Concept
The concept behind Chaos City was simple: to create as much chaos as possible with as little input to the system as possible. We used this as our razor statement for this game, which helped immensely with keeping focus and eliminating unnecessary content and features from creeping their way into the game.
Gameplay
Players throw water balloons to force people into the street to be hit by cars. Kills are tallied and the player is ranked by how many kills the player can achieve by the end of three minutes.
Graphics
The graphics for Chaos City were all modeled in 3D, and then rendered to 2D images with which to make flash files.
Artificial Intelligence
The AI for the people in Chaos City is a simple state machine. There are six states: a walk state, a dodge state, a panic state, a pause state, a return state and a dead state. People are by default are in a walking state. When a water balloon hits a person or hits the ground near a person, the person enters a panic state. This makes the person dodge a random distance in a random direction. The pause state is then entered and the person remains paused for a configurable amount of time. After pausing, if the person is not on the sidewalk, the person will enter the return state to run back to the sidewalk. The person then returns to the walk state. The panic state is entered if someone within a configurable radius of a person either dodges or panics.
The cars in Chaos City have a similar state machine. However, cars do not have a panic state and each type of car has its own dodge state. These dodge states are activated after a car has been hit by three water balloons. The beige car will slow down and then reverse, the red car speeds up and the yellow car swerves off the road and onto the sidewalk. When a car collides with any other car, the second car’s dodge state is activated. We were going to implement some realistic collisions between cars, but found during play testing that players thought setting off chain reactions or cars was extremely entertaining, so we kept the current collision method.
