Fourth Iteration!

Hello! Welcome to the development blog for Beat ME UP! (it's a working title). My name is Kenny and I'll talk a bit about this game I'm currently developing. Beat ME UP! is a single-player Beat ‘Em Up game for beginner and casual players where you play as a character who is a well-known fighter locked up in an unknown building by an unknown person trying to escape and get revenge using his extraordinary martial art skills.

This game is an assignment created for a subject called Game Genre Studies 2. In this subject, I have to build a game from scratch based on a genre given. From then on, I have to reiterate the game and send the game out to playtesters to provide feedback every week!

This is currently the fourth iteration/build of the game, so let's get right into it!

This is the tutorial stage of the game, as you can see, not much is being done on the stage yet! Just some button prompts on the screen and a very basic level design. For the past few iterations. I've only been focusing on polishing the player character's attacks, I've even neglected enemy AI up to this iteration where I added a player detect behaviour and attack behaviour.

So what have I done about the character? Just look at these GIFs, they're really self-explanatory.

New                                           Old

The first thing we can notice is that in the older iteration, the animations are too fast and bounces all over the place. In the new one, the animations pause for a bit, especially the ones that hit harder. Another thing not really apparent in the GIFs is that the cooldown between combos is shorter. At first, I thought having a cooldown between combos might be a good design choice to let the player 'strategically' attack instead of just spamming the attack buttons, but after a couple of feedback from different testers, players just want to punch and 'beat em up', the cooldown between combos just frustrates the player and makes the game unfun. 

Lastly, we can't talk about developing a fighting game without mentioning hitboxes and hurtboxes. To make a fun and fair fighting game, the sprites must represent the actual hitboxes and hurtboxes. So, I took some time to make sure all the hitboxes and hurtboxes are as accurate as possible (and biased towards the player ;]).

That is all for this week's development blog post, thanks for reading!