You Should Play Rollerdrome

Lately, I've been obsessed with a game called... Rollerdrome. It's a white-knuckle, lightning-fast arena shooter on rollerskates. So you're trying to blast bad guys, while moving non-stop. And when you run out of bullets, you'll need to do tricks - like grabs and grinds - to refill your ammo. It's a gem - a game that merges the arcade thrills of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games, with the chaotic combat chess of DOOM 2016.

It's a combination of two of my favourite games of all time. It's like, was this game made specifically for me? Well... in a way... yeah.

You see, shortly after the game was released, I received a tweet that said "I just found out that Rollerdrome was originally conceived in GMTK's first game jam" and I was like... "what". But it's true! Check the Itch.io archive for the first Jam and you'll find The Roller Dome - a top-down, twin-stick shooter on rollerskates. Effectively a playable 2D prototype for this year's coolest game. Well, second coolest game.

PAUL: "I think I was kind of in the headspace of making a shooter or a movement shooter and trying to come up with a unique premise around that but a lot of the ones I had seemed a little forced or they weren't really connecting in a natural way". That's Paul Rabbitte, creator of The Roller Dome. He was a freelance dev, but working on solo projects and game jams in his spare time. Including the GMTK Game Jam for 2017, which had the theme of "Dual Purpose Design".

PAUL: "I think that's where the kind of aha moment kind of came from it's like what if it was Tony Hawk style movements but doing tricks gave you ammo to link into the shooting side of it and it was those two things together it just felt like a natural fit. And it felt like it linked the two sides of the game together really nicely. Of course, there's only so much you can do in 48 hours - so the jam entry is a little fiddly, crazy hard, and didn't make it into my top 20.

But the idea stuck, and soon Paul was remaking the game - this time in 3D. He posted GIFs of the project on Twitter and the whole thing just blew up. The videos racked up thousands of likes and retweets - and got the attention of different publishers. Soon, Paul was chatting to Roll7 - the devs behind the side-scrolling skate gem OlliOlli, which seemed like a natural fit. And so now he had a whole team of artists and designers to make this game real.

Which is beyond rad. A number of GMTK Game Jam games have been polished up, expanded, and released as awesome games on Steam and Switch and elsewhere. (I actually have a Steam curator list of such games - find a link in the description.) But to have a jam game go onto become a full-fat indie hit with cracking reviews and a launch party and all that jazz - well, I just had to hit up the developers to find out more.

So, as it turns out - it's not all that easy to take a pithy proposal like "Tony Hawk's meets DOOM", and then turn it into an actual, fully fleshed out game. Like, in the beginning, the devs had a pretty literal take on that mix - with most of the features from skating games, plus most of the mechanics from an arena shooter. And the result was... an overwhelming mess. A game that was impossible to learn, too much to take in, and like two games competing for your attention at once.

So they had to start chipping away at unnecessary features, from both sides of the equation. From the skating side of things - moving forward is now completely automated, it's impossible to bail, and you don't need to play a teeny balancing mini-game while grinding. And to help make shooting more simple, there's a shared ammo pool, snappy auto-aim on the early weapons, and a massive injection of slow mo at the touch of a button - aka, reflex mode.

PAUL: "Bailing is sort of fine in Tony Hawk's because all you're thinking about is skating. And in DOOM, all you're thinking about is shooting and kind of dodging and stuff. So that's all you have to think about, that's fine. But when you put them together and players think about all these different things, it made sense to simply and iterate until we found the kind of most natural combination of the two sides of the game".

The designers found other ways to keep things simple and streamlined, too. So, while enemies used to chase you around, most of them now stay in place - letting you make a pretty effective mental model of where each bad guy is standing. And by surrounding the level with quarter pipes, you'll always be shoved back into the arena - even if you're not looking where you're going. Now, that might sound like the game has been stripped of all challenge - but it just lets the devs put the difficulty elsewhere.

So each Rollerdrome level is a non-stop onslaught of bloodthirsty bad guys. There are enemies, laser beams, puddles of poison, and stomping mech walkers. All of them ruthlessly out to get out. Just like Doom, you finish each encounter with your eyes watering from not blinking enough. If you finish the encounter at all, that is. And so we end up with a game about just trying to survive. PAUL: "We were after a certain feeling. This super high intensity thing. We wanted to feel like a bloodsport so we wanted it to feel really dangerous and so even when we were pulling out mechanics we knew the focus was on creating a certain feeling for the player and so everything could guide towards that".

But what's really cool about Rollerdrome, is that - over time - your experience with the game changes. While it might start out as a game about surviving - eventually, as you get better at the game, learn more skills, and unlock more weapons - it becomes a game about dominating. Perhaps the best example of this shift can be found in the game's "super reflex" mechanic. So, a useful move in Rollerdrome is the dodge, which lets you bounce away from enemies or swerve past snipers to make them lose their tracking. It's a key tactic for survival.

But, if you dodge at the very last moment before taking damage, you'll get a "perfect dodge". And if you enter the slow-mo reflex mode now, you'll go into "super reflex", which massively amps up your attack power and lets you rinse through bad guys. This changes the dodge from a defensive move, into an offensive move. You're now taunting enemies like a bullfighter and juking baddies like a quarterback. DREW: "It's a big pivot in in the gameplay because all the enemy attacks that you're previously terrified of and that you've been killed with multiple times... all of a sudden they become like an asset to you and a thing that you can exploit. And go from defensive or maybe evasive to actually like 'bring it on, I'm gonna skate into that landmine or that rocket'. It's a gameplay moment but narratively, for me, it's when Kara really starts to believe in herself. And starts to feel like 'I'm not running away from these

enemies anymore. I'm gonna turn their attacks against them. I'm gonna take the fight to them'. It's also a great example of hiding additional depth and mastery within a game's core mechanics. Super reflex doesn't ask you to learn new combos or buttons - just to use the game's basic verbs - dodge and reflex - but now with more risky timing. Plus, it's an example of a game mechanic evolving organically throughout development.

While prototyping, the devs discovered that they could actually clip through enemies unharmed if they dodged with just the right timing. So this was fleshed out, and turned into perfect dodge. And then, taking inspiration from Bayonetta's witch time, it was decided that players should be rewarded for taking this risk. And the easiest way to do this was to add a bonus to an existing mechanic: reflex. These serendipitous discoveries became the backbone of Rollerdrome's high level play.

DRE: "You know it's early doors yet. The game's only been out a couple of weeks. But I've seen some people doing that kind of stuff and I was like 'wow, people have already got real deep on the system'. And it's just really heartening to see people just connect with our game on the way that we really hoped they would".

Now here's the really clever part: Rollerdrome actually facilitates this shift, from survival to domination, through its meta-level progression. You see, the only way to unlock new levels is to finish these bonus challenges. And they push you to play better. The high score challenges require you to play with skill and intention - to go beyond just trying to survive. Other challenges subtly teach you high level tactics, like enemy weakness toward certain guns, or the super reflex I just talked about.

And when you return to earlier stages to mop up unfinished challenges, you'll likely find that where you once scraped through and barely survived - you're now blitzing your old high score, dominating the competition, and revelling in your transformation from prey, to predator. DRE: "Your increase in skill is really evident. And you are whooping ass in those earlier levels. And you feel more powerful and you actually get to see how much you've progressed from some of the struggle to where you are now. And I think that is a powerful feeling too, it makes people feel good".

So, a game jam game is usually just the kernel of an idea. A seed. And it takes time, skill, and care to cultivate it into a full release. But Rollerdrome goes to show that this can have great results. This is a game with a wonderful core experience - supported by clever design where players subtly morph from scared survivors into predatory pros. Some incredible games have been made during game jams - like Superhot for 7 Day FPS. Titan Souls for Ludum Dare. Baba is You for Nordic Game Jam. And Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes for Global Game Jam. And so now, I'm really proud for the GMTK Game Jam to have had a teeny tiny role in the creation of an awesome game like Rollerdrome.

GMTK Patrons on the bonus video tier can check out an extended cut of my conversation with the developers at Roll7. And if you want to see more incredible game jam creations, then take a look at this video, where I reveal the 20 best games made for this year's jam, which had the theme "Roll of the Dice". See you soon.