Råwkass
Råwkass is an arcade machine and game developed as a semester project at Medialogy. The machine was featured at Roskilde Festival 2013 thanks to a successful collaboration with both Medialogy in Copenhagen and Roskilde Festival.
Up to 4 players join in, and compete in a free-for-all deathmatch match that lasts about 1:30 minutes, and the player's direction is controlled through a rotary knob, and will always continue in the direction you are pointing. Players have only one way to hurt the other players, yelling, or other types of continuous noise into their respective microphone.
Your screams are translated into a beam that the characters fire from their mouth. The louder you yell, the wider the beam. To reward those that use their beams a little more tactically, players will heat up while yelling, and can end up killing themselves with it.
There are six different levels in the game, all with some sort gimmick involved:
- Concrete Party: Walls to take cover behind. A bomb in the center of the map will eventually detonate, taking the floor with it down onto another level.
- Meadow Hell: A unicorn travels around the map, instantly killing anything that touches its tail.
- Clock Heaven: The gears slowly turn, moving the players around. As the game goes on, the speed and direction changes.
- Ice Planet: A simple map like the first, where dodging and moving is the most important. An large piece of ice allows some cover, but it can be moved and melted.
- Cactus Pit: The center of the map contains a sand vortex, that can draw you in if you get too close.
- Dazzle Mountain: The walls of the mountain slowly creep inwards, as the game progresses, the fighting space becomes very tight.
Each map lasts for about 45 seconds, and will transition into the next map through its own specific ending transition. There are never any loading screens or holdups.
The ice world will for example start breaking apart across the center, leaving players to fall down onto the next stage as the first one breaks.
The six different levels in the game. All levels can dynamically transition into any one of the others.
"Finishing" a project and actually finishing it are usually two different things, so it was great to actually end up with something that could stand by itself at a busy festival for close to a week while serving people at all times of the day. Not that it didn't have its share of trouble: We anticipated drunk antics, and tried to make it damn near beer and idiot-proof, but did not expect that it would end up being toppled 3 times. Fortunately, our hardware was up to the challenge. Microphone cables were also cut and stolen along with the microphones, but we had spares, and fixed up everything quickly.
