Having had such fun adding interactive capabilities into our drawing game, Interference, and making Mixer’s first interactive live hosted quiz Zeitgeist – we thought that we should actually start to build Mixplay into our new games, from the beginning.
We came up with the idea for Rogue Drones during a Christmas party last year – around the time that drones were plaguing Gatwick airport and stopping flights. There seemed to be no technology available to stop these drones – so we came up with the idea of duct-taping a stun gun to our own drone and taking out the rogue drones with that!
We just thought it would be a good joke – but within a few days Nathan, our lead developer, had come up with a workable prototype which turned out to be fun to play! As we have progressed with it, we’ve been getting some very good feedback. This made us think that maybe we should make a fairly polished prototype and show it at London’s EGX-Rezzed show in April. We could get feedback and maybe get some interest from publishers and journalists.
We had the concepts in place, but in order for it to look as good as possible for Rezzed we engaged the services of an awesome graphic designer and Duck Games streamer, the Mixer-partnered BobDuckNWeave. He made us a fabulous new logo and did all the UI for the game.
So here is the premise:
You’re working at the airport and the day seems to be going well, when suddenly you spot something out of the corner of your eye! It that a… drone?
Panic ensues – you don’t want your airport shut down, but budget cuts mean you can’t afford any anti-drone tech. You’ll have to improvise: get your own drone out, duct-tape a stun gun to the top of it and use it to chase down and disable the rogue drones throughout the airport. Dodge planes, helicopters, the air traffic control tower and home in on the drones one by one. If you succeed, maybe you’ll make headlines in the newspapers!
The interactive part comes in the form of various buttons that viewers can use to create problems for the person playing. They can increase the wind speed to blow the drone off course, or reverse the controls so that up is down and vice versa. The stun gun can be disabled and the charge up slowed right down.
Each time a viewer uses one of the buttons – they get a shout out in the game in the form of a message on the screen from Air Traffic Control that might say something like “A Hacker calling themselves (name of viewer) has been messing with some of our radio signals” or “Storm (name of viewer) is approaching, don’t get blown off course!”
As he adds things into the game and fixes bugs, Nathan is livestreaming a dev update each week around 8pm on Wednesday evenings. You can check out the progress of the game and admire the new art on our Mixer channel: https://mixer.com/interference
If you miss one – you can see some on our YouTube channel too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ2byVNsaHQ
In our next blog I will be talking about exhibiting at EGX Rezzed 2019 – and the talk that we are going to give at the show: “Adventures in Livesteaming: A Developer’s Tale.