Posted October 17, 2019 by Sboydstun
Hello everyone, Sam Boydstun here to discuss another development update on our game Builder's Brawl. We currently are just about at the half way point in the semester long production of the game, and have begun to implement some of our gameplay features. I'm excited to share with you where the future will lead us and how quickly we have been progressing.
Previously in Builder's Brawl's life cycle, there was a great emphasis put on creating quality collision interacts between the players. We wanted players to hit each other with boards, push each other into dangerous obstacles and have all of this feel great. Even with a couple of iterations and playtesting, we eventually had to come to place where we made exceptions. Now, in this new production cycle, we can finally right those exceptions by pushing a rag doll system that will drastically change how our game feels.
In this development cycle we were able to fully flesh out our 6th level, the mushroom jungle. It is ready to be fully play tested by the public and added to our level matrix. Currently the level lacks some terrain texturing but otherwise has all of its VFX, lighting and design mostly completed besides a final art pass. This is the only level in the entire game that focuses around a single platform which we dub the "stump arena." All of the mushrooms surrounding the platform emit a toxic gas that will paralyze players and push them to the very smokey death floor. Overall this is also one of our only levels using a high amount of emmissive textures mixed with dark lighting and its really awesome how it came out.
This level will undergo one final art pass to finalize it before the game ships, adding in textures to the terrain, more mushrooms around the outside rocks of different variations and dripping toxic spore visual effects to mushroom around the level. We wanted to create a dark complex atmosphere that players would enjoy. Also there are little pixies that float around the level who take part in watching the action, giving our brawling builders an audience.
The board "place" ability is the only way players build in the game, connecting one board to another or to the environment. The old animation was causing players to put the board to far out in front of their feet, thus if a player was standing on the end of a board trying to build, they would just throw the board off. We fixed this programmatically, but needed an animation that made sense as well, otherwise the player would just see the boards snap backwards towards them. We use some creative liberty here with the actual "nailing" of the board, and hope our players enjoy.
Here our board slam animation was updated to give a more whimsical feel to the interaction that players will most often us throughout gameplay. Slamming in Builder's Brawl is one of our playtesters favorite abilities and we wanted to make it even more satisfying visually when you smash your friend into the ground.