No More Boxes! - Crush your friends with boxes physics arena platformer
October 2015 rAge update:
No More Boxes went to rAge expo and tons of people loved it!
New "official page": http://www.twoplusgames.com/nomoreboxes
New video and gifs: http://makegamessa.com/discussion/comment/37879/#Comment_37879
18 Dec Update
> Post compo version.
> Post compo one controller MADNESS edition
See the next post for full details!
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10 Dec Original Post
OK, as usual, TL;DR first:
Game link to No More Boxes.
4 player arena platformer. No shooting, only physics. Web, Windows, OSX, Linux. All there.
Gameplay video: (thanks for the Joburg meetup for the opportunity to take this vid!)
Gifs:
Hey guys!
So Joburg Ludum Dare didn't have a venue, and everyone was in the Free Lives mansion having a party. So what did I decide to do at home? Make a party game, of course. THAT'LL SHOW THEM. *mumble grumble*
OK no not really. This was my 2nd Ludum Dare and I daresay the healthiest game jam I've had. I slept every night (albeit for 3/4 hours each) and I had a plan. I was utterly surprised.
I'm gonna try and very briefly summarise my journey through the jam, as I've documented it in several places, which I'll link to because noone likes a wall of text.
1. I really liked the theme while (seemingly) everyone didn't. I enjoyed interpreting the theme to the extreme of what I called the strict conservation of everything
2. I set those restrictions, and then set learning goals for myself. Things I hadn't tried but wanted to.
3. I built the game based on my previous experience with Bear Chuck, so I have some kind of stable ground (punny!) to work from. But building a good platforming controller was all new to me so that was explorative.
4. The Chrome + Unity problems that I'd been having has led me to really think about what it takes to get people playing, which I also included in the blog.
So thanks for reading if you got this far, enjoy the game, and I hope the stuff I've learned was helpful to you too :)
No More Boxes went to rAge expo and tons of people loved it!
New "official page": http://www.twoplusgames.com/nomoreboxes
New video and gifs: http://makegamessa.com/discussion/comment/37879/#Comment_37879
18 Dec Update
> Post compo version.
> Post compo one controller MADNESS edition
See the next post for full details!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
10 Dec Original Post
OK, as usual, TL;DR first:
Game link to No More Boxes.
4 player arena platformer. No shooting, only physics. Web, Windows, OSX, Linux. All there.
Gameplay video: (thanks for the Joburg meetup for the opportunity to take this vid!)
Gifs:
Hey guys!
So Joburg Ludum Dare didn't have a venue, and everyone was in the Free Lives mansion having a party. So what did I decide to do at home? Make a party game, of course. THAT'LL SHOW THEM. *mumble grumble*
OK no not really. This was my 2nd Ludum Dare and I daresay the healthiest game jam I've had. I slept every night (albeit for 3/4 hours each) and I had a plan. I was utterly surprised.
I'm gonna try and very briefly summarise my journey through the jam, as I've documented it in several places, which I'll link to because noone likes a wall of text.
1. I really liked the theme while (seemingly) everyone didn't. I enjoyed interpreting the theme to the extreme of what I called the strict conservation of everything
2. I set those restrictions, and then set learning goals for myself. Things I hadn't tried but wanted to.
3. I built the game based on my previous experience with Bear Chuck, so I have some kind of stable ground (punny!) to work from. But building a good platforming controller was all new to me so that was explorative.
4. The Chrome + Unity problems that I'd been having has led me to really think about what it takes to get people playing, which I also included in the blog.
So thanks for reading if you got this far, enjoy the game, and I hope the stuff I've learned was helpful to you too :)
Thanked by 1roguecode
Comments
TL;DR: I made a post-compo version, with a lot of tweaks to make it a smoother experience. Details of changes below. It's available as Web, Windows, OS X and Linux.
Then, for those who don't have friends around to try the 4-player game, there is also the MADNESS EDITION, which has all 4 players' controls bound to P1 controls, for messing about if you don't have friends around. Senseless, but oh so much fun! The MADNESS EDITION is also available as Web, Windows, OS X and Linux.
Focus questions:
1. Is this fun? Should I work on it further? Do you wanna play it?
2. Is it "too violent"? More on that below, but I've gotten that feedback and I wonder if the cute fluffy nature of the graphics conflicts with the nature of "death" to result in that perception?
3. I've had nothing but positive comments on the LD page, but there's not much response beyond that. Is that an indication of multiplayer games being hard to get plays, or is it something else?
4. Is "balancing" necessary in a game like this - between characters? I feel like balancing for imbalance creates more opportunity for fun, rather than balancing for "every character must be equally strong".
Post Compo updates
There's been quite a lot of interesting learnings that I've made with No More Boxes. A lot more than I ever expected to! Thanks so much for everyone who has already commented and gave feedback on the compo version :)
Blood on the dancefloor
It's been party season lately, and I've had two parties where I had the opportunity of taking the game with a full compliment of controllers. It's gone down a right riot (I have videos, it's hilarious despite terrible hand-shot quality), but what surprised me the most was that a lot more people remarked at it being "so violent". That had not occurred to myself at all - everything's so cute and all the foley sounds were so adorable, but alas, more than half people made the remark, some jokingly, a few with genuine concern.
So many people would say "it's not a big deal", and that's what I would be inclined to say too, had I not heard it from so many people, gamers and non-gamers alike. So this has forced me to really examine my own tolerance for violence, and whether it's right to inflict my own sensibilities on other people so freely and without care. Especially lately with the Hatred/Steam thing in the news right now. How much is too much?
So I came to a conclusion - that it doesn't matter of the splatters are red or not, there's nothing lost and everything to be gained by changing that up - as long as there are pretty particles flying about, who CARES if it's "blood" or not? So I changed the splatter particles to the player colours. Which looks great! I may need to tone it down a bit more than it is right now (in volume terms) still.
What do you think?
Character tweaks
Amy
The 6th character Amy has been implemented - she's also a pickup/throw character, but she throws diagonally up, which makes her a really difficult character to master, but she does is really unpredictable with the way her shot rolls and bounces.
Porter
Porter received an update in his attack behaviour which is correct now according to original design - he teleports a random box in front of himself. This useful ability can be used in many ways, though the most obvious and easy way is to drop boxes on your opponent. Added juice makes it clearer what his ability does to people who don't know.
Stompy
Stompy has proven to be a super strong character if the players don't have the experience to deal with him, so I've decided to balance him out a bit by making him marginally slower in movement speed than other characters.
Tosser, Punch and Sucker hasn't changed at all.
10 Points To Win
I hadn't the time during the compo to implement a winning system, and I very quickly realised afterwards that any game with points need a short term goal, or you very quickly lose interest/tension. 10 points to win REALLY helped people keeping up interest rather than "hey I'm tired, let's restart".
Keeping the player indicators on for super long
Nothing is more frustrating than not knowing where you are. The whole "wiggle your stick left and right" ritual gets really tired really quickly. Barring any other form of player identification, the indicator now flashes and lasts 15 seconds. Most players didn't even register that they were there for so long - and in the beginning I thought they would be too annoying if they stuck around for too long. But that didn't turn out to be the case in No More Boxes!
Floppier Physics
I had made the Physics slightly more robust, so that boxes are allowed to roll around more before snapping to places when they almost come to a rest position. This made much more emergent gameplay a reality.
Then there were a bunch of minor things, like adding some more sound effects, some more juice visually, fixed a few bugs that let players out of the "gate" when they weren't controlled by players, and things things things.
Post Mortem
The stuff I learnt during the jam can be found in a previous post, where I talked about:
> Restrictions are good - and why this theme was pretty awesome for me.
> I set out with a few learning goals, and this is how I applied them.
> Things to keep in mind to get more people to play your game.
Play No More Boxes compo version
Play No More Boxes post-compo version
Play No More Boxes Madness Edition
Some criticism based on the images (which might be naive as I've got to still try the game in practice) :
There appear to be a lot of unfair deaths. Sometimes a box is rolling and it kills a player standing on top of it. This doesn't look fun.
Although the animations are low framerate, and might be missing some important detail, the action is really hard to follow. It seems like boxes travel really quickly, and quite often there's little warning that something is about to happen. I think this is exacerbated by the large learning curve (as all the characters do different things).
Towerfall solved this by displaying extra details about the player's intent (so when the player drew back their arrow the game draws a line which gives away their intentions), and the arrows themselves travel relatively slowly. In Towerfall it is possible to shoot rapidly, but this feels more fair because it feels like player's are sacrificing accuracy for rate of fire (even though this wasn't necessarily the case). In Towerfall drill arrows slow down a moment when they are about to pass through something, the point being that slight delays are built into places where the player is about to be surprised, and this design principle is applied across the board except for the lightning/seeking arrows which players tend to find unfun.
Death in Samurai Gunn of course is a lot more sudden than in Towerfall, but Samurai Gunn is also a lot more controlled. The lines of attack in Samurai Gunn are very well defined and so anticipating opponents is easier. Because Towerfall is more complicated it necessarily slowed the combat down a little bit and displayed more information about opponent actions. Towerfall still manages to feel quite chaotic even with its more languid combat with more feedback.
What I'm essentially saying is that it appears like it would be difficult to predict when you're in danger, which could make death quite frustrating.
Because of the physics nature of the engine, I couldn't "wrangle" it correctly in the time of the jam. There was indeed a couple of mysterious death situations, and if I'm going to take this further I definitely need to iron those out.
Right now the kills are determined by a short ray cast in the direction of the box's movement. I need to fine-tune that a lot more.
The sudden nature of the deaths really makes the game feel a lot more chaotic and confusing than it needs to be - so I'll definitely work on making actions more predictable. In the symmetrical attacks of the characters of Towerfall and Samurai Gunn, attacks are learned and much more predictable, so I need to work on a system that indicates the intention of each of the characters. Adding delays is also a great idea, like how fighting games have hit-pause when moves connect.
Great feedback, thanks so much! :D
TL:DR - I took No More Boxes to rAge and people loved it. I didn't work on it much before because I thought it wasn't well received here (despite being my best LD game), but now I'm asking again:
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF NO MORE BOXES!?
For the longest time, I didn't really focus on No More Boxes, despite it having come 47th in Fun in LD31. That was a huge deal for me.
The reasons I hadn't pursue it much:
> AI - the ever-changing arena meant that building AI for it would be really, really hard, at least I didn't have a clue how.
> Multiplayer-focused games were known for being a tough sell, due to the barrier of entry of needing friends to play with.
> Feedback here had been lukewarm at best.
Then I took it to rAge as one of my three "furthest along" games, after adding in some stuff to it:
> Bits of "prompts" to show players what their character does.
> Different levels
> A demo mode
> Slightly tweaked physics
And really really, people who played it, loved it. There were people playing from kids to older guys, and they just all giggled their asses off, so I feel like I must pursue it.
Here's a video of a game during rAge, I really wanted to edit together the people playing and the game footage, but er, it's really hard matching up footage from my camera to my screen recording.
So I'd like to get your opinions on No More Boxes!
1. Do you think it's worth pursuing, why yes? Why no?
2. Have you played it? Would you like to?
3. Do you have any insights into building platformer AI?
4. Do you think the name may have deterred you from playing the game?
Here's the "official page" of the game:
http://twoplusgames.com/nomoreboxes/
On which I put these gifs to explain the characters:
That's why I'm asking what your plans for the game are. I mean, there's absolutely nothing wrong with polishing it to make it stand out even more at conventions - it's great having a "crowd game" in your back pocket that can get people to pay attention to your stand no matter where you're set up. It's just that if "further" means "selling", then that requires a lot of planning and expectation management.
There is definitely a difference between "meatspace" games and games for sale. As for how the game would be packaged and sold, well, my thinking now involves single player modes as well as arena modes. No online multiplayer as the lag would probably destroy the experience. Single player could be AI bots or Bubble Bobble-like level clearing story mode type of thing with progression. Having all these character abilities also mean that puzzle-like design is also something I thought could be done.
I'm looking for outside eyes to give me an indication, for experience to weigh in on my lack thereof. Does the fact that there are 3 comments here basically say "don't do it" despite it doing well during LD and expo environment? Or are there more to consider?
Thanks for the post-mortem, I'm gonna watch the shit out of that.
I also think that the reception of a game depends on its context a lot. In the link @dislekcia posted the guy also touches on it a bit. In this case just because it was well received in a jam setting does not mean it is meant for "full release".
Also, just because it was well received in a jam/conference setting does not mean it's not meant for "full release". I'm trying to get to a point where I understand when a game is good - yes we all know that "if your game goes viral without you giving much of a damn then you should pursue it". But not everyone has a Broforce or Desktop Dungeons or Viscera Cleanup or 2 years in a Stasis or etc etc. Does that mean those without those viral mad games just keep prototyping until they do have one, potentially never ever actually finishing anything?
There must be a bit more metric to it than "when it goes viral"? :/
Aaaanyway... If you want to sell No More Boxes, I'd ask what you're planning to invest in it and what you're planning to get out of that. To help you figure that out, find out who you'd be selling it to. Who are they, what do they like, why do they want a local multiplayer game, what can you give them that existing local MP combat games can't? Can you differentiate yourself from Towerfall? Can you get the game into MORE local MP festivals and showcases? What happens when people have to keep playing the game for 5 hours straight? What value to people see when they look at the game, when they play it, when they see other people playing it? (I'm not saying that these are magical questions that will fix everything, but they'll help you think about the game in a product mode, at the very least)
"Finish" means to attempt to make something commercially profitable, to attempt to make it pay your bills, in whatever method. Whether crowdfunding, F2P, steam, festival income, whatever. No, I don't have all the answers.
Thanks for the list of things to consider, they'll make a good start.
In the meantime, I'll keep making prototypes and waiting for a jackpot :/