Ben Fellows
Runaway Robbers
Runaway Robbers is an alt control game that truly leans into the idea of controller first gameplay. Featuring a giant 3'x3' board covered in over 14 meters of LED lights that mirror in-game traffic in real time, this is a game that is completely playable without every having to look at the screen. Using 31 light-up LED buttons, your team needs you to control the traffic lights to help them escape from the police after their latest bank heist!
Roles: Producer, Designer, Composer
Engine: Unreal
Team Size: 9
Production Dates: January 2023 - May 2023
As the producer...
I led a team of 9 graduate students in developing this alternate controller game. Depending on where we were at in our sprint, I would run stand-ups with the team or if I knew we were just continuing previous work, I'd just talk with everyone individually to see where they were at. I'd then use this information to generate and distribute our tasks via trello every sprint.
In addition, I ran playtests once every sprint where I then gathered and distributed relevant feedback to the team. I also prepared and gave update presentations to the class every four weeks dressed as a robber of course. These check-ins served as our milestones. I was also in charge of monitoring our budget and preparing expense propositions if we needed to go over it.
An often undervalued part of producing but a necessary one, I worked hard to keep the team's morale up. This was a project that took a lot out of us and it wasn't always smiles all around. The addition of the physical controller aspect meant we were often working with things we weren't the most familiar with and mistakes were made. I made sure that when things happened, I kept us wanting to move forward. During the occasional weekend workday, I'd bring in food for the team. If I thought someone was taking it particularly rough, I'd sit down with them and just talk for a while.
Lastly, I also prepared our entire submission to GDC which involved working with the school of architecture to recreate the top out of a solid piece of wood and of course preparing our submission video (seen above) and all relevant images and information. Ultimately, it was a final product we're all really proud of and we're really excited to show it off at GDC this March!
As the designer...
I worked on finding the fun of our initial pitch and in designing the controller. Originally, you were playing as a minimum wage worker trying to keep traffic moving. However, we quickly realized the fun was in crashing cars. This pivoted to be the heist-escape version we have now. We still had another big design question to figure out though. How do we actually control the traffic?
Our first prototype featured a four-way intersection with one button for every light. This led to confusion on which button corresponded to which light and also wasn't feasible if we scaled it up to a full city. A version of that controller would've featured a whopping 64 buttons just for the stoplights. We ultimately settled on having one button per intersection where pressing it once would alternate which two lights were green. A double press would turn the entire intersection green and cause "accidents".
After deciding this, we spent a lot of time trying to design an interesting city map. Unfortunately, cost limitations in how many LED light strips we could buy would end up having us return to the idea of a grid-like city with 25 four-way intersections. This did seem to strike the best balance of complexity and readability while still maintaining our budget and we're happy with the results.
As the composer...
I wrote the main theme played during gameplay. Besides just being used as something players listen to during the game, the song also held the responsibility of signifying the end of a round. Our game does have "You Win" and "You Lose" screens, but as we were emphasizing a screenless experience, we needed a way to tell players when it was over. The song has a big buildup at the end that we found does this quite well.
Check out our full launch video here!
