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Brains Eden · 2019

Robrawl

Robrawl is a 2–4 player local multiplayer robot brawler built by Team Sollara for Brains Eden 2019, a UK student game development festival. Robots duke it out in an arena with punches, knockback, and pickable "pinballs" they can launch at each other: last robot standing wins.

  • C#
  • Unity 2019.1 (LWRP)
  • Rewired
  • Odin
  • DOTween
  • TextMesh Pro
The Robrawl title card animating in over the dojo arena, its spiked boundary fence and pinballs scattered across the floor

Team Sollara

I led as project manager and programmer, working in C# alongside Odin, DOTween, TextMesh Pro, and Rewired to drive local multiplayer input across up to four controllers. The game runs on Unity 2019.1's Lightweight Render Pipeline.

Team Sollara sitting together wearing Brains Eden 2019 t-shirts

Team Sollara at Brains Eden 2019.

Team Sollara posing together with drinks, captioned 'Sollara Bois!'

The Project

Robrawl drops two to four players into a top-down arena as robots, fighting to be the last one standing. There's no fixed loadout or ranged weapon to start: every robot can punch for knockback, dodge/dash out of trouble on a cooldown, and pick up one of the "pinballs" bouncing around the arena to fling at an opponent for ranged damage. Multiple arenas shipped with distinct themes, from a spike-fenced dojo to a neon, low-poly city street lined with traffic cones and parked cars.

The Pinball System

A BallSpawner drops pinballs into the arena on a timer, doubling how many spawn each wave (up to a cap) so a match starts sparse and escalates into chaos. Balls are only safe to grab below a speed threshold: a PinBall shifts from white to red as it crosses that threshold, telegraphing whether it's currently pickable or still dangerous to touch. Once a player grabs a slow ball, they can fire it from their Player's launch point at high speed toward an opponent.

Robrawl gameplay: two robots circling each other in the dojo arena among scattered pinballs and crate obstacles

The dojo arena: robots circling for an opening while pinballs and crates litter the floor.

Knockback, Health & Ring-Outs

Damage is handled through a small, reusable Health component and a static HealthDamager helper that any system can call into: a punch, a thrown pinball, or the spiked Fence bounding each arena all route through the same AttemptToDamage / AttemptToKnockback calls. Taking a hit grants a short invulnerability window before a robot can be damaged again, stopping one lucky combo from chaining into a stunlock.

Rather than a shrinking ring, ring-outs are handled by a simple distance check: PlayerManager runs a respawn/ring-out coroutine that removes any robot knocked far enough from the arena centre, so a big enough hit (a punch or a well-aimed pinball) can end a robot's run outright instead of just chipping its health.

Robrawl gameplay: two robots fighting in the neon city-street arena among traffic cones, a parked van, and pinballs

The city-street arena: same combat loop, completely different dressing.

Robrawl shipped as Team Sollara's entry to Brains Eden 2019. The source lives in a private university-team repository rather than a public one, so there's no code link here, but the pinball push-your-luck loop and the reusable pooling/health framework behind it carried straight into later Sollara Games projects.

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