Posted August 06, 2019 by Black Mamba Studio
#gmtk #game design
Mocho vs Mostros is a one screen first person beat'em up where you have only one arm to eliminate your enemies one by one.
We came with the idea after brainstorming about the theme of the GMTK Game Jam 2019: Only One. The ideas? Here they are:
We had our favorites, but we learnt with our last jam game "Cabron en Transmilenio" that it is better to make the game we love the most and we could achieve successfully during the jam duration. Maimed Boxing won, so we started to think about different gameplay mechanics and it's plot.
We came with the idea of a badass action hero Rambo-Saitama-like with the ability of killing any enemy with only one punch: Mocho ("mocho" is an expression used in Colombia to describe a maimed person).
He has saved the world many times and in this adventure he must destroy alien invaders from outer space. We called them Mostros (is a common bad spelling of "monstruos", the Spanish translation for Monsters).
To beat as much Mostros as possible we imagine gameplay similar to Punch Out but using a first-person perspective like Doom, enemy after enemy will spawn and try to fight you until you defeat them all or die trying.
We started working with only one thing in mind: to have the very basic mechanic of killing a monster with one punch ready. Once that was done, we decided to make the enemies attacks on a rhythm-based pattern (we implemented a metronome following the bpm of the music for that). As we started to kill 'em all we discovered that actually implementing some fighting game mechanics like parry and cancel frame would be great to make it more rewarding. At some point killing enemies became too easy, se we decided that we needed to make the Mostros avoid the attacks from the player, the only way to kill them now is to caught them off-guard.
There are four ways to kill the Mostros:
We created 3 different types of Mostros to encourage players to use different techniques to kill them.
The idea of using stamina came later as a way of preventing players to rush punching madly, every hit consumes a 20% of the total stamina, and Marta drains stamina with her special attack. To recover stamina players need to kill enemies, a regular kill recovers 18%, a parry kill recovers 30%, and just waiting recover 1% per beat.
We spent a good amount of time tuning the patterns, timeouts and stats for Mocho and the Mostros, but it can always be improved.
We have more ideas to continue with this game development like including a global leaderboard, increasing the beat of the music and the speed of Mostros with the player progress, including different challenges such as: perfect combos, use parry only and use regular punch only.
That's it! thank you so much for reading this! we had a very good time making this game, we are glad to receive any feedback or comment, so don't be hesitate :D!
Ps: all the game code is hosted on github. We built Mocho vs Mostros with Godot 3.1 <3
Ps: we are using 💪 to refer to mocho and to the game itself. ;-)