World Cricket Championship 2
World Cricket Championship 2 (WCC-2) is a top-rated cricket video game for mobile, windows and mac platforms developed by Nextwave Multimedia pvt ltd, Chennai. I worked as a Game Developer, throughout the production of the game. The game was developed using Unity game-engine. I was responsible for developing interactive gameplay tutorials, master sound controller, dynamic commentary system and few UI modules of the game. It was a great experience working throughout the development and I’ve written my experience in developing some of the features.
Trailer
Interactive gameplay tutorials
WCC-2 has a wide range of batting and bowling styles that need to be explained to the user who lands in the game for the first time. I developed a centralized tutorial system which triggers tutorials corresponding to the currently active batting/bowling style. The tutorials were added in the later stages. So, the implementation is done is such a way that it doesn’t affect any of the existing gameplay functionalities. Developing tutorials for the pro-batting controller in the game was challenging since the user needs to be informed on the fly about the multi-touch nature of the controller and the timing skill involved - both at the same time.
Game audio
I took complete ownership of the game’s audio system which involved in-game sounds like commentaries, crowd ambience, on-field sound FX and UI sounds. I wrote a single Unity script which acted as the master sound controller for all these sounds over multiple Unity scenes.
Dynamic commentary
Having played Cricket 07 (EA sports - 2006) and Don Bradman Cricket 14 (Big Ant Studios - 2014), I felt the commentary in WCC-2 should be dynamic and random without any noticeable repetition. So, I came up with as many cricket scenarios as possible and wrote commentaries based on my experience watching many cricket matches. I also reviewed and picked the best among all the recorded commentaries. During the gameplay, commentaries are played after making up to four maximum levels of scenario checks which ensured that repetition of commentaries is almost impossible.
Downloadable content
Eventually the commentaries were decided to be made downloadable because of the cumulative size. By design, since the sound controller existed as a separate system within the game, the commentary files could easily be converted into Unity’s AssetBundle. But this threw another challenge of cross-checking the compatibility of AssetBundle from the server with the version of game currently installed in the user’s device. To address this, I implemented a functionality which interacts with server and checks for three version incompatibility scenarios whenever a download is initiated.
UI modules
Ngui was used to develop UI of the game since it was the best option at the time of development to reduce the number of UI related draw calls in the game. Apart from implementing UI by configuring existing Ngui presets I also implemented custom UI modules for the Team-list scroll in the team selection screen and the Help screen. Both these screens were quite challenging since the content had to be populated from server at run-time which means spacing, positioning and functionality of the UI elements are all determined dynamically.
Game settings
I also took ownership of all the events / features listed in the Settings screen. This involved Graphics, Sound, Controller and gameplay settings.