Star Wars Arcade 2
Playerthree was commissioned by Disney to redesign and develop and brand new Star Wars Arcade on the Disney games website.
Star Wars Arcade is a central hub that allows fans and players to explore their very own arcade here on earth. You can access an expanded suite of web games direct from the arcade, as well as interacting with great Star Wars characters and objects hidden away in the space. The new arcade features Han Solo in Carbonite, Imperial guards, Storm troopers, a new force mini-game, new quiz system, new trophies and achievements. The background features fantastic artwork from the Star Wars brand and films, an interactive timeline, and all-new video display screens featuring iconic scenes from Scarif, Endor, Hoth, Bendu, Jakku and the Imperial fleet.
The original arcade had an illustrative style, and Disney wanted to improve on what existed by adopting a sharper more realistic visual style, reflective of the visual quality of Star Wars. We also needed to remove the old customisable room and make the whole space customisable as well as almost every surface, poster site and display. The arcade now features even more content, ships, droids and games.
To create a much larger, more realistic space, but still run efficiently and be customisable, the arcade space was reconstructed as a series of parallax layers constructed using tiles, this allowed for a great sense of depth and 3D style parallax, as well as a fully dynamic camera systems to which settles and zooms in on content depending on what the user is doing. The original arcade had some nice visual effects but was ‘on-rails’ in terms of zooming and panning.
Our new system allows for the dynamic placement of almost everything in the space and for the camera to react to where those items are. When you customise the space visually the switch over is seamless.
The original arcade was an award winning project, and the client’s expectations suitably high, so it was a real creative and challenge to get right and it’s fair to say everyone’s extremely happy with the results. In fact, the only things retained were the loading sequence and button style which is consistent across all the existing games in the arcade from multiple developers.
The new Star Wars Arcade 2 launched at the same time as Rogue One launches before Christmas 2016 and features all existing Star Wars Arcade games; Specila Ops, Yoda Training, X-Wing Fighter, Team Tactics as well our very own new kick-ass battle game: Rogue One Boots on the Ground. The Star Wars Arcade 2 is built on WebGL and Pixi.js
