It's that time of the year again!
The arguably most iconic wrestling matches is where a couple of participants start off in the ring and at a fixed rate, the buzzer sounds and another participant enters the bout. Elimination occurs when both feet touch the ground after going over the top rope, and the last participant standing wins. We can't count the many great moments this match has given us watching, but also in pro wrestling games, it offers a perfect setup for couch multiplayer action.
While the countdown battle royal is but one of many match types featured in Casual Pro Wrestling, it's the one that makes a certain feature come into effect the most: there is no limit as to how many wrestlers can be in the ring at the same time! Where many popular games will simply halt the countdown once a handful of participants are in the ring, in Casual Pro Wrestling, they'll just keep coming. Let's have a look at some of the chaos, shall we?
As you can see, there can be a lot of things going on at the same time. Of course, this is only fun when the game runs smoothly, and the good news is that Casual Pro Wrestling handles this quite well. The above footage was recorded on a medium tier gaming notebook using an unoptimized development build of the game. While, frankly, that isn't saying too much, what you can take from it is that we're not talking about high-end hardware being required for experiencing this kind of chaos.
The game has been designed with bigger matches in mind, and performance is always a key criterium when making decisions about how new features are implemented. Created wrestlers are good example: the vast majority of the wrestlers in the video were created in the game's CAW mode (and they need not necessarily appear in the release version). When saving a created wrestler, there is some post-processing to ensure that we get the best possible performance. Most importantly here, body and attires are baked into a single 3D model with a single texture, with body parts occluded by the attire being removed completely from the model. This reduces complexity, and therefore, created wrestlers are relatively lightweight on the graphics card.
Other portions of the game will hopefully benefit from larger matches being possible. For instance, we have seen a Las-Vegas-themed variation of the aforementioned match emerge that will likely find a way into the game, and while team matches are not yet implemented, they are definitely on the roadmap - maybe we'll have look at that when it's that other time of the year?
There's a few more things you may have noticed in the video, one of which will be featured in a future development blog. To that end, stay tuned and feel free to ask away about anything. At the very latest, see you for the next development blog!