Rush Hour

3D Puzzle

Brit Milvang-Jensen
Jette Weiss
Dennis Frith

Our Idea

Conversion of an existing single player board game over to a PC as a 2-player co-operative game.
Move cars vertically or horizontally so as to free the red car of the traffic jam.

Platform: UNITY
Click here to download game (Mac and Windows, 14 MB)

Starting the Game

In windows: Click on the file RUN.exe in the folder RushHourTwoPlayerWin
On Mac: Click the RushHour Icon (RushHour.app) ???

Goal

Freeing the red car of the traffic jam – through cooperation.

Control

Player 1 controls the vertical cars with the arrow keys:

Arrows ↑ and ↓ move the car
Arrows → and ← select next car (marked by a coin)

Player 2 controls the horisontal cars with the keys ASDW:

Press A and D to move the car
Press W and S to select next car (marked by a coin)

Weekend Report

The theme this year was cooperative multiplayer games.
Brit had brought a hard copy of the puzzle RushHour, and had an idea of how to transform it into a 2 player game.
Jette and Denis liked the idea, so the group was formed .
We quickly decided upon using Unity – though none of us are Mac users.
Choosing a language was harder. Brit was not experienced with Java, and Jette was not experienced with Boo/Python (weird, but Lisp was our only common language). We did not want to use C#.
Brit and Jette collaborated in JavaScript.
Denis, the artist, made the board and some nice cars in 3DStudioMax on a pc close by.

Our main design choice was whether to simulate the collisions physically or use an array.
We chose the array solution, because rounding errors etc. may cause the cars to get shifted slightly.
Another solution would had been to place collision spheres in the front and rear of the cars, and use a collision handler that moved the cars to the center of discrete squares.
Another advantage of our solution is the low time complexity of array accesses.
Perhaps we were to eager to get started to make a decent planing and object oriented analysis.
But we chose to implement the levels as scripts, so it will be easy to add more levels.
Because of the short dead line, we chose to implement just one level, level 7.

GameJam2006 was an amazing experience.
The weekend offered many new acquaintances with nice people and JavaScript, Mac and Unity.
Everything was well organized, fun and games; and we look foreward to the next GameJam.

Improvement

The game was made in but a weekend's time; and we have left it "as is", with all bugs and such. Here follows a list of improvement suggestions.

Fixing the known (and found) bug that makes the cars (and coin) not-solid until moved
Testing, fixing other bugs
Making a victory scene
Adding sound
Scripting more levels
Modelling the van found in some levels
Implement the timer
Implement high score
Enable competition between player 1+2 and 3+4 (etc) – Timed or number of moves
Make an intro (tutorial) or simply instruction
Possibly include the traffic jam in a larger car game