WELCOME TO PUNCH!

About Us:

Greetings fellow game developers / gamers! 

We are here to present you our game for the DAE Game Projects Jam 2019!
Out team consist of 3 programmers and 2 artists. We're all students in the second year of DAE at Howest Kortrijk.

We're currently in the prototype stage of the development, so there's still a lot we need to figure out, but feel free to tag along!

The Idea:

PUNCH is a quick, action-based, chaotic party couch game. It’s a knock-out type game for 4 players.

The camera looks down on the map where the players will spawn.
The map starts rather empty, however, it won’t stay empty for long because blocks will start falling from the air onto the map!
The players can punch those blocks. They will slide/fly in the direction they were punched.

The goal of the game is to be the first to reach a certain amount of points.
The game consists of multiple rounds. Every round, there is a slightly different map.
To get a point, you need to be the last man standing in the round.

As the title of our game clarifies, our main mechanic will be a punch.
Players can knock each other off the map by punching blocks towards them, but they'll also have to look out for the blocks that fall from the air. They hit pretty hard :).

We're planning on introducing pickups and events into the game later, to get an even better experience.

Important Questions :

• Can blocks fall on top of each other?
   - Blocks could possibly stack up too high, obstructing the players view.
• What happens when a block you punched hits another block?
   - The moving block just stops
   - The moving block keeps moving and the other block moves with it
   - One or both the block break from impact
• How exactly will pickups be obtained
   - The spawn randomly on the ground
   - They come out of blocks when they break
   - They spawn on top of blocks, so you need to punch those blocks in order to get the pickups
   - They spawn at certain locations at certain times, so players can act on that knowledge
• How many lives/respawns does each player get in a round
   - Each player gets just 1 life (this will result in quicker rounds)
   - Each player gets 3 lives (this will result in slower rounds, but players get another chance during that round)
• Game mode
   - Free for all
   - 2vs2
• Can you punch other players?
   - Give a slight knockback?
• Block generation
   - Competely random spawn locations vs. more blocks spawn around players location
   - Controlled amount of blocks that spawn vs. random amount vs. an amount that increases as the round goes on
• Different types of blocks?

What we have so far:

We (the programmers) each started our separate prototype so we could have multiple versions of the base mechanics and so we could get used to perforce and the engine without interfering with each other too much. 

Then we picked the best parts of the various prototypes and combined them together. We also messed around with some small variants on the mechanic (for example: should moving blocks destroy each other, or should they push each other away?)

We've implemented the following features:
 - Basic player movement
 - Input for 2 players (both on keyboard)
 - Block spawner that spawns a fixed amount of blocks per second. 
 - The player can punch blocks
 - The player can be killed by a block falling on their head or a moving block hitting them off the map.

Art / Setting:

The idea for the players is that they will play as robots with giant hands.
The map theme is Harbor/Port and the players will be able to punch containers.
For various maps, will have multiple variations on these harbors and each of them would have a different kind of culture/atmosphere.
For example : Sci-Fi Harbor vs Egyptian Harbor

The setting will be very colorful like in the Mario games, with very saturated colors.

 We'll make use of low-poly models, small textures and gradients.

Plans for next week:

Next week we are looking to add:

- Some pickups  (Ex: reflection shield, block cannon, etc...)
- Controller support
- Win/lose states for rounds
- Tweaking & testing the mechanics to increase fun factor

Ending notes:

We really hope we can make something good out of this. It's always hard to finish up a game, get it completely polished, no bugs, etc...
But we'll do our very best not to disappoint you guys!

Feedback and suggestions are always welcome!
A new download of our build will be available every week. Feel free to test them out!

Stay tuned for more...