ROAMING KING | Roam and Conquer
Roaming King is a gamemode I built with Halo 5’s Forge editor and scripting system, and it is now available to be played in Halo 5: Guardians Matchmaking. I worked closely with the 343 Industries Design Team, and led a team of professional level designers to bring the playlist of 6 maps and the gamemode to matchmaking.
In Roaming King, players fight to control a zone as it rotates around the map. Unlike Halo’s Crazy King gamemode where the hill teleports to a random spot on the map on a set interval, this roaming hill crawls around the map on a predetermined path. Two teams of 4 battle it out on a curated selection of levels with varying play-styles. On one level you may be battling it out in tight alleyways and sliding down rooftops. While on another you may be running through hills while fighting ground vehicles, and in another you'll be spiraling around a chasm fighting a Wasp for air superiority.
ROAMING KING LEVELS
T H E T E A M
DOWNLOAD LINKS
J A C O B S T E G M E I E R | PROJECT LEAD
MANAGEMENT | LEVEL DESIGN | UX | GAME DESIGN | LEVEL SCRIPTING | ASSET CREATION
C A R S O N B A R R Y | PROGRAMMER
LEVEL SCRIPTING | GAME DESIGN
C H R I S T I A N F I L I P | DESIGNER
GAME DESIGN | ASSET CREATION | FRUIT STAND ART
T Y L E R E N S R U D E | LEVEL DESIGNER
LEVEL DESIGN | ASSET CREATION
F R A S E R W A K E F I E L D | LEVEL DESIGNER
LEVEL DESIGN | ASSET CREATION
N A T H A N N O Z I M E | DESIGNER
LEVEL DESIGN | ASSET CREATION
DEVELOPMENT
The original inspiration for Roaming King was Doom 2016’s Warpath gamemode. It really is the next step of evolution for King of the Hill in FPS. Warpath was an ingenious yet simple concept that never reached its full potential in Doom. While I’m extremely grateful for what Certain Affinity had come up with, the mode was hindered due to some core flaws with the scoring method that unfortunately hurt the match experience.
With Warpath, how the mode worked was that the zone would snake its way around the level on a set path. However, the way in which players scored was in a similar manner to how one would capture a territory in Halo or a control point in Destiny. A team member would stand in the zone for a set amount of time (usually a few seconds) and then they would “capture” the zone. From there, they were not required to stand in the zone anymore and they would score points incrementally every second until the enemy team would capture the zone. Then, that team would begin scoring points themselves, unless the zone was contested where members of both teams are in the zone.
This is THE fundamental flaw with Warpath. Having the zone scoring being a “capture” style system, causes a snowball effect. Because the zone paths are designed to be in very contestable locations, one team has to constantly put themselves at risk, while the scoring team is essentially getting “free points” until they win the game. They don’t have to put themselves at risk to score and can simply defend from safe locations and run the map until the game ends. It's just far too difficult to capture the zone as the non-scoring team than what is actually reasonable.
Roaming King fixes this issue. Essentially, replacing the method of scoring from “capture” mentality to “King of the Hill” mentality solved most of Warpath’s problems. Instead of requiring a set prolonged capture time, the time to capture the zone was instant, so that your team would score points as long as you had exclusive control of the zone and had at least one member standing in it. However, as soon as your team had no members actively in the zone, you would no longer score. Then, if members of both teams stood in the zone, neither team would score until one team had exclusive control.
E L E C T R I C B O O G A L O O
W A R P A T H 2
I N C E P T I O N
T H E P H E N O M E N O N
WARPATH
KING OF THE HILL
ROAMING KING
MEANS DEAD
It was also a crucial decision to NOT have score rate increases for the amount of members in the zone. Most versions of KOTH have it, so it was something that was requested during Roaming King’s development. However, I decided against it. Essentially with Roaming King, you do not score more points for having more players in the zone at a time. What this does is it allows for more depth within teammate positioning at any moment, and it empowers individual players to make clutch plays on their own. It removes the incentive to just add bodies to one space and encourages more coordination in teams.
What this avoids is the dog-piling nature of just throwing bodies at the zone mindlessly. Much like what happens in Overwatch’s escort and Halo’s King of the Hill mode. Players often settle for keeping one or two team members in the zone while the others hover around the zone from various vantage points while guarding approaches from enemy players. At the same time it entirely removes camping as a viable strategy because if the defending team stands still, the zone literally leaves them. However, all it takes is ONE enemy team member to kill your zone member and contest to cause an upset. This leads to gripping matches where teams of near equal skill will score neck and neck to sometimes where some matches are decided with 1 point score differences.
E M E R G E N T
G A M E P L A Y
THE TECH
Roaming King's movement path is composed of a multitude of Target Points that act as vertices for where the zone object is to follow from Target to Target. Once the zone gets to the initial starting point, it just goes back through the loop and starts the sequence over again.
Best practice for this would be to have the zone item move at a set velocity then have it trigger the next movement offset to the following target once it collides with a Target point.
However, sadly Halo 5's forge editor doesn't allow for setting the velocity of an object movement. It only lets us set the time and the target coordinates the object. Because of this, the time of movement for each individual line segment had to be calculated to get a perfectly smooth rate of speed. This was calculated using the ratio of the individual segments distance compared to the perimeter of the entire route. Then, taking the total time of movement to do a comparison ratio for every movement segment. Carson and I eventually built a spreadsheet where we could plug in the coordinates and get the correct time to plug into every movement offset script.
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7 SEC
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2
M O V E M E N T
The code for the scoring is actually very simple. Firstly, the core of the function of Roaming King is run by a loop that fires by a very short set timed interval. We call this Roaming King's heartbeat. The heartbeat checks the zone for living players inside of it. This loop constantly checks for 3 states: Red Control state, Blue Control state, and Contested. The function counts the living players of each team in the zone. If at least 1 member of a team is in the zone with no one contesting, their control state is fired and they begin scoring a point every second (this is a separate heartbeat at a different time rate). When members of either team are in the zone, the contested state is fired and no one scores points. If no one is in the zone, the contested state is the default as well.
Roaming King also has sound design and UX considerations. Capturing the zone will play a sound and a voice line claiming the zone is captured. It'll play a much more negative sound if the enemy captures the zone. As well as this, the quotes "CAPTURE" or "DEFEND" will show up on the waypoint depending on who is in control and if the zone is unoccupied.
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