Spartacus: Rise of a Gladiator – Summary
Group 25: Gautam Krishnan, Satish Anand Ravi Anand Prasad, Siddharth Vijayaraghavan
Varadarajan, Thomas Misiaszek, Varshini Sampath
Spartacus: Rise of a Gladiator is an action/adventure role playing PC game based on the real-life
story of Spartacus, a Thracian gladiator who led a slave revolt against the Roman Empire. The
player plays Spartacus in this single player game. The game is set in the Gladiator Training School
in Capua which is under the control of a man named ‘Vatia’.
The player can choose between two modes: A Training Mode and a Story Mode. The Training
Mode sees Spartacus initially getting trained in Capua to become a fierce and skilled gladiator.
Once trained, the player enters the Story Mode, which follows Spartacus plotting a frantic escape
from the Gladiator Training School with two other gladiators - Crixus and Oenomaus and clearing
the three floors (levels) of the School, overcoming all the obstacles by fighting combats against
security guards. The player is declared a winner if he manages to escape from the Gladiator
Training School and loses if the health reaches 0.
Game Design:
For proper design of the game, we need to have a thorough understanding of the history of
Spartacus. Since the entire life-story of Spartacus cannot be explained in a video game, a crucial
part of his life-story that will be appropriate for game design needed to be selected. After
analysis, we decided to depict the Gladiator training that Spartacus underwent and his escape
from Capua as the main plot.
An essential, though often overlooked part of designing a game, is to tutor new players how to
play the game. In our game, there is a separate User Tutorial section which teaches the user all
the controls to play the game. In addition to this lot of AI components are incorporated into this
game like the security guards and the gladiator school’s trainers who obstruct the path of the
player and put up fights against the player. These add elements of surprise into this action
adventure game.
Navigation
The game begins on the top (third) floor of the school from where Spartacus must make his way
to the bottom. The pseudo-3D environment allows the player to use the arrow keys to move
forwards, backwards and look sideways. Each floor is a complex maze through which the player
navigates and interacts with objects and encounters opponents. Spartacus must free the other
two gladiators, who are imprisoned in the first two floors and escape with them. Each level has
a ‘Boss’ who must be defeated before proceeding to the next level. As the levels increase, so
does the difficulty and the final boss is the toughest opponent in the game.
It has four main parameters that affect the player – Health, Attack Strength, Armor and XP. The
health of the player determines how much damage the player can take. The Attack Strength
indicates the amount of damage that will be inflicted on the opponent when the player launches
a successful attack. It also varies according to the weapon that is equipped. If the player equips
an armor, it provides him with additional defense. The XP denotes the combat experience of the
player. It increases as the player defeats opponents.
Constraints:
The game includes several design constraints as well. The game is to be restricted to a pseudo
three-dimensional environment or 2.5D which takes advantage of using graphical projections and
techniques and that try to simulate three-dimensionality. The game must be from a first person
point of view and the player’s actions do not include three-dimensional actions like observing a
room, jumping, crawling, etc. The game must also have gradually increasing difficulty with each
level to maintain a challenge for the player.
The game requires a machine with a minimum 2GB of RAM, an i3 processor, GTX 960 graphics
card and a connection to the internet to view and post the high scores. The game fires up and
show the launch/splash screen within 3 seconds of starting the game, when all the data is loaded
in the background. This loading of background data (which includes all the game files, maps and
saved games) does not take more than three seconds and is ready by the time the splash screen
disappears.
Apart from the game data, the game stores the maps files in a binary format. Each file is expected
to be around 1MB. As there are only three levels as of now, and the number of levels are expected
to increase in the future versions of the game, the storage space required for the maps is
expected to be much higher.
The server must be able to handle the requests for fetching and posting the high scores. At least
200 requests per second must be handled by the server and about 2GB of disk space is needed
to save the following data: Username, score and date/time when the score was made.
Conclusion:
The aim of this project is to develop an interesting and engaging pseudo-3D video game that
outlines the story of the rise of Spartacus as a slave warrior, in a fun and interactive manner. The
game combines elements of surprise, adventure and action with the motive of educating the
player of the history of Spartacus along the way.
The prime objective of this game is to teach a user about a crucial part of the life-story of
Spartacus through a narrative and role-playing game. Thus, the success of this project depends
on two main factors. The user as a player should find the gaming experience competitive and
entertaining. The game includes a lot of surprise elements and has the look and feel of a huge
gladiator training academy. Secondly, the game is also designed in such a way that the user knows
who Spartacus is and how he emerged as a slave warrior after undergoing the gladiator training
at Capua and escaping from it. Thus the game appeals to the user both visually as well as
intellectually