ShockRods

ShockRods features all the over-the-top, in-your-face vehicle combat that you have come to expect from Stainless Games, the world renowned indie studio that specialises in vehicular mayhem.

It's is a 6v6 or 12-player free-for-all arena shooter (PvP and PvE), featuring blisteringly fast-paced action, crazy power-ups and overpowered weapons.

ShockRods draws inspiration from the classic “kill or be killed” arena shooter greats of yesteryear, but in vehicles with insane mobility. ShockRods are customisable, technologically advanced vehicles, nimble but tough, equipped with multi-directional boosters for super-fast direction changes and jumping, resulting in truly thrilling and action-packed gameplay.

Driving a ShockRod is easy. But once mastered, it becomes an even greater high-octane, thrill-a-minute ride!

Reactive and Nimble  

ShockRods is a great example of how Stainless can pivot and quickly change direction if an opportunity has been identified.

ShockRods started life as an experiment (just like all the best entities do) for one of our teams to learn how to use Unreal Engine. We soon realised that we had a brilliant nugget of a game and moved into full production.

Deciding to take a different route to market than the traditional “going for gold” approach, Stainless created a BETA programme to allow players early access to the unfished game. This gave us access to two different aspects we needed help with.

Community Testing 

1. Player feedback! Having access to players and being able to take their feedback and use it to tune the game before release was invaluable. 

And 2. Server load testing. We utilised AWS and their GameLift server tech to run our servers. This was a first for us so having a way of scaling load before release helped us make launch day a success.

We started production with ShockRods being a PC game. About halfway through production we suddenly had the opportunity to publish on “Apple Aracde”. Well, when I say suddenly, that was how the business opportunity arose. Getting the game to now run on iOS (including AppleTV) was no mean feat. As ever, Stainless rolled their collective sleeves up and soon the game was available for iOS as well.