Harvest Havoc

by kaine027, lemonscopestudios, and quietsovereign on 1 Jun 2024 for Rookie Awards 2024

Harvest Havoc is a networked multiplayer PVP party game and is available to play on Steam. This project was developed in 8 months by 7 students (3 artist, 4 programmers) from Auckland, New Zealand.

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Harvest Havoc

by lemonscopestudios

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A chaotic and rowdy multiplayer PvP party game for 2-6 players. Grow, harvest, and sell your crops to win! But the fun twist is that you can also sabotage others and steal their crops. Best played with friends, family or co-workers remotely, bring out your inner gremlin and compete to become the ultimate farmer-warrior!

The main goal is to pick up seed packets with different rarities, grow and sell them to earn points. However, you can also steal them from other players either by attacking them on their way to selling or stealing directly from their 'private' plot of land. Round 'public' plots are usable by anyone but can also be stolen by anyone.

There are three weapon types; slam, spin, and bazooka. Respectively, they are melee, AOE, and ranged weapons to allow for different attacking strategies and player interactions.

As the host, there are three game modes you can choose to play, giving you a variety of gameplay experiences. The gameplay dynamics are also varied as the way players interact with game objects and each other would change due to the differing rules and mechanics in each game mode. You can also choose to play in teams or in free-for-all where it's every farmer for themselves!

For every other player, find the server your host created and join it.

There are five animal-suit characters and eight colours you can choose from. Chubby and armed with a great sense of fashion, they embody the wacky and hilarious chaos that is about to unfold as you face off against one another.

At Vertical Slice, Harvest Havoc had one playable map with another one close to being functional. The environment showcased a simple round area for the players to interact within.

As the game continued to develop, we created three more themed maps with increasing complexity in not only the visuals but the level design and map-specific gameplay as well. We were also able to make maps of different sizes to cater to the changing number of players within a play session.

Modular prop sets and pieces were created to fill the environments, quickly build large objects and avoid repetition between similar environment props. Seamless tiling textures were used for large surfaces like the ground and walls. Modularity, procedural generation blueprints and customisable shader parameters were the major methods used to reuse assets and assemble a large number of maps within a short time, along with Unreal's foliage and landscape editing modes.

DISCLAIMER: The skybox in the floating island maps is originally from an early version of a FREE Unity Asset package made by Render Knight. The license for this asset pack allows us to use the skybox texture in our game. Photoshop was used to edit the texture to make it usable in Unreal as well as to add extra detail for what we needed.