“Riot is a riot simulator based on real events that have been influencing the western (sic) civilization in the past few years”, reads the official website’s description for this mobile game, and the 2013 trailer for the game, featured above, reiterates, “This game is based on real events”.
Riot contains four main campaigns based on real-life events: the No TAV movement in Italy, the “battle” of Keratea in Greece, the Indignados movement in Spain, and the Egyptian revolution of 2011. The developer claims there are many smaller, unlockable scenarios included, too.
Each simulated scenario is unique, containing its own art, characters, events, and scripting, meaning that each scenario plays differently. A unique element of the simulation is that character movements are physics-based, meaning that each person in a crowd reacts to the individuals around them.
Something did confuse this author. On the website, a statement reads: “Only comments and reports from the people [participating in] the conflicts will be taken into consideration, attempting to depict both sides of the fight without bias, only objectivity and facts.” This seemed contradictory.
In response to inquiry, Leonard Menchiari, Riot‘s director, clarified:
Talking about actual objective truth is very hard, considering that most news is manipulated, and that when you experience a riot personally, most emotions are way more intense because of […] the adrenalin rush.
Some scenarios will have in-game evidence, but all the scenarios that we’re building for the game can be backed up by thousands of photos and articles that anyone can find on the web.
The game will include a level editor, which will let players create, upload, and share their own scenarios with others. Mechiari continued:
By creating a level editor, we hope that some may decide to create specific events to inform us about riots that we still don’t know about yet. Of course, it’s going to be another point of view, but by summing together more points of view, we might be able to understand a collective truth about some specific events.
The development team consists of Leonard Mechiari, previously an editor and cinematographer at Valve, and now the director for this game; game designer Danilo Catalano; gameplay programmer Claudio Mazza; graphics programmer Jendrik Illner; composer Simon Michel; and sound designers Eric Wegener and Rolando Nadal.
Riot‘s developers aim to bring the game to Windows and Mac PCs, Android and iOS mobile devices, and OUYA. Its launch window is this summer, but it was recently stated that Riot needs to be reprogrammed, so the wait will be a little longer than was planned. However, writes Mechiari, “considering that most of the art side of the project has been made, I’m not worried about how everything is going to turn out.”
