Production sprint 1 week 1

Heaven vs Hell

Prototype Conclusion

We finished our prototype last week and realized a couple of things.. The most important one is that we really need to set the pace for our game. The prototype was playable, but everything was rather chaotic. The contrast between Heaven and Hell felt weird for the people that tested the game. Players moved too fast in Heaven and Hell was rather slow..

Entering Production Sprint I

What this means is that we throw everything away we created until this point in time. Things will start up slowly but get back up there fast since we already have a general idea how we can set everything up thanks to the prototype.

This week we are very excited to start digging deeper into the mechanics and really start developing a topdown brawl game. We want the game to feel really competitive and therefore we need to make everything feel fast, snappy and fun!

We don’t want people to play 1 game and feel like: “That was fun!” We want them to jump straight back in the game and try and beat the winner.

Important Decisions/Questions

The stage switch

In the prototype we tried making one big character controller that dynamically switches between Hell and Heaven. Things were getting complicated, so we decided to make separate characters for both stages and just spawn them in on a switch.

Hell mechanics Vs Heaven mechanics

In hell, players walk around. In Heaven they float. This means that movement feels completely different in both stages. We discovered this during prototyping and would love to keep it this way. But the hard part is that we still need to make everything feel coherent which I mentioned above. It will be hard to balance this kind of switch but we’ll be able to do so with enough people testing the game.

Problems

During the recreation of our CC, we encountered problems with rotation. We are using PS4 controllers at the moment, which means all the input is mapped to only PS4 controllers. But Unity handles rotation weirdly to say the least. It has some weird snapping happening, something to do with the joystick’s deadzone. Remaking the Hell character controller went pretty fast, except now we decided to use a Raycast pointing downwards to detect if you’re jumping on top of a player. We’ll also be using this Raycast to detect if the player is grounded of course. This allows us to introduce a new mechanic, you will be able to jump on top of each other to kind off “stun” them. We will call this “DAZED”.

Questions we are asking ourselves

We already said we wanted to make a unique brawl experience. But a bigger question is: “Why would people come back to the game?” How can we make it interesting enough to make people want to beat each other up again and again!

We need to make the game easy enough to master fast, so people feel like they can beat anybody with just a tiny bit of skill you’ll develop pretty fast.

Next week

For next week we will make character models and trees. The camera will be made and the main fighting mechanic for hell will be implemented. We will start with the main menu and add mechanics to heaven.