[Prototype] A Boxing Game on Boxing Day
PLAY BOXER
I've continued work on the prototype. I went the direction of physics (i.e more floppy arm movement).
Just like before, works only with controllers, XBOX ones should work. Player 1 is black and Player 2 is white.
Oh, and the game is designed to be played literally top down with each player on either side of the screen, that's a bit hard without a laptop that goes all the way down or an actual monitor to place flat on a table. I have included an option to rotate the screen for one player to kinda test the controls and how it feels without twisting your head.
Throw all the feedback, mainly how does it feel?
Thanks.
I've continued work on the prototype. I went the direction of physics (i.e more floppy arm movement).
Just like before, works only with controllers, XBOX ones should work. Player 1 is black and Player 2 is white.
Oh, and the game is designed to be played literally top down with each player on either side of the screen, that's a bit hard without a laptop that goes all the way down or an actual monitor to place flat on a table. I have included an option to rotate the screen for one player to kinda test the controls and how it feels without twisting your head.
Throw all the feedback, mainly how does it feel?
Thanks.
Comments
Are there no keyboard bindings?
(I like the visuals by the way, reminds me of Realistic Summer Sports Simulator)
Using the basic Unity Input manager, any hints on fixing it without actual XBOX360 controllers?
Let me know what you think of the new build?
Just a .gif of my progress. No new build as of yet.
This beautifully distills boxing down into it's most essential parts. I'm impressed. I'm keen to punch some face when you have a build.
Have you played much Fight Night? I thought that game really captured the feeling of boxing (albeit at a much higher fidelity). I mention fight night because it had a beautiful knocked down/ get up mechanic, and the possibility to get back up through sheer force of will, after being beaten down again and again, with the small hope of a comeback, made the very best fighting game narratives I've ever experienced.
What I mean to say is that in boxing, being knocked down, and having the referee tap out to 10, has a wonderful drama about it, and Fight Night captured that. Since then the knock-out drama of boxing is something I crave in every boxing game.
Thanks @BlackShipsFilltheSky. For a prototype that almost got thrown out I'm pretty happy I kept at it. After watching a lot of boxing games and matches I've noticed how the knock down and the counting to 10 makes boxing different from another fighter. I feel like I've got a fighter not a boxing and I really want to have the knock down feeling that boxing has. I don't want to add any more controls. So, as of now I'm thinking that at the end of "round" You roll the joysticks to recover health and it increasingly gets harder every time you get knocked down. Need to prototype this.
So, throw some feedback at me.
Just throwing some ideas out there in case you like them:
- a bit of a slow mo? I often think of the iconic slow-mo shot where spittle/sweat goes flying off of a boxer's face. I think if that were to happen for really meaty hits (so maybe not all of the time) it could feel really good.
- What if dodging was a thing? What if, if you moved both of your sticks in the same direction, you jerk that way for a moment? I imagine that'd feel a bit more like boxing too, where a lot of the movements seem like fighting on your toes and dancing around.
I haven't touched the game any further from the current build. I'm waiting for play testing this Tuesday at the Jo'burg meet up. That was one of the first effects I had tried to implement but it didn't come out too well but after all the effects work I've done I have a new idea to get the slow mo effect like you've mentioned. Initially it just slowed down the time and quickly sped up to normal speed but now I think I'll have
- split second stop upon beefy hit
- slow mo for a second
- quickly speed up to normal Dodging is a feature that keeps being brought up that I think with your approach would be worth investigating in the next build because it doesn't involve new buttons. Funny :') Could also add this taunting / playing around behaviour before the match in the title screen to get people into the control scheme. I also want to add the you've got to touch fists to start the match.
It's probably tricky to do, but the hug mechanic I think is pretty integral to boxing... if maybe you could reach right around an opponent and pull them towards you in order to rest for a moment when your stamina is low and the round is about to end.
Boxers hugging is the most intimate thing in the sport, and possibly the most interesting. That they'd leave it in the rules is interesting, for a sport that is otherwise so hostile and macho. Maybe it's fun to watch broken and tired men desperately hug to stay on their feet a few seconds longer, but it seems anathema to everything that precedes it.
Also clinching in boxing is a defensive thing - it's all about preventing punches from happening, there's all sorts of strategy to it ;)
Guard impacting at the start of a Soul Calibur round sounds like a rad house rule!
I had a simple rounds system that resembled Tekken or Mortal Kombat, win 2 out of 3 rounds. During each round the boxer could regain health that was equal to their stamina (yellow bar) if they hadn't been hit for x amount of seconds. This was to allow the game to have a reward for defending.
After the meetup and suggestions on the forums I begun to recognize a certain pattern in feedback given. It seemed that “gamers” (people who play a fair amount of games) wanted a lot more depth that was tied to a more complex control system. They wanted to weave and dodge; move the boxer; etc. While others who didn't play that many games, enjoyed it for what it was, a simple funny game.
This was a tough point in deciding the direction I was going to further take with the game. Make the game more complex with more controls to add depth or stick to the simplicity and look for other avenues to add depth. The depth being more strategic play. I made the decisions based on the vision I had initially started with, which was to make a simple intuitive game that didn't need much to explain. I wanted a game I could give my mom to play without going through a long list of controls.
So, how do I add a bit more depth? I wanted it to feel more like a boxing game than a fighting game. So, first order of business was changing the rounds system. The rounds system was quite closely related to the health system. The premise of the new round and health system is that in boxing you get tired as the rounds progress therefore
I decided to have a persistent health for the whole match. Your health bar would decrease as you get hit and so does your stamina bar but slower than your health. Then at the end of each round you regain health (will to fight) by wiggling the controllers to maximum of where your stamina finished at the end of the round. The problem that followed with this is system is that towards the end of a match there would be 1 punch rounds because you'd never be able to recover enough health for a substantial round.
I fixed that by making your stamina depleted completely if it reached below 40% at which point your health flashes. When your health is flashing there's no chance of recovery after the round UNLESS you win the round in which you get a slight boost in health. This makes some matches very interesting when you see a player come back to have a fighting chance.
That's how I tried to add a bit more depth to a pretty simple game without adding any complexity to the control system.
The feedback on the getting stunned confused me a little bit. While stunned it's definitely a good idea to defend, but often I read wrong when I should attack again and found myself unable to land a blow. I'm actually not sure what my problem was, but I was struggling to come back from being stunned and I'm not sure why.
I wasn't playing Boxer in the idea setting to learn the game obviously. Maybe I'd have understood it better after a couple more rounds.
One thing that strikes me from your description. I didn't know there was a yellow bar. Or rather, I saw the yellow bar, but had no idea what effect it had on the game. Maybe drawing more attention to the yellow bar having it more prominent to begin with, or flashing it, particularly when it does whatever it does, would help with the feedback.
What I'm curious to see is how / if upper cuts will be implemented?
Also seems like amount of inner arm crossing should be limited since it can be over powered...
The game had a lot of emergent depth to it, that's for sure. At first it just seemed like you could win by flailing away with more conviction than your opponent, but then I saw a much more calm and collected defensive strategy from @francoisvn utterly destroy people, even after he got stunned a few times. Then the game switched up again and became a matter of trying to land quick jabs through openings when two defensive styles matched up against each other... That's when the real mindgames started: Feinting to create fake openings to lure your opponent into a big swing that you can capitalise on; Timing your defense to bat an opponent's swing out of the way and leave it far from where it can protect them; This had it all. And then seeing people do the single-hand controller massage to gain health back faster between rounds? That's the stuff of party-game epic win, right there.
About all I'd suggest doing with the game is making the stun state not being able to reach a bit more obvious and maaaaybe emphasise the stamina bar between rounds with some sort of animated texture to let players know that their health is slowly refilling "up to here". Beyond that, maybe add some image-space warping to the hit effects and polish those up a bit with some emphasis particles (See Soul Calibur for great hit emphasis particles, they do both momentum-carry and hit spot reflection particles, it's amazing) and like, make the ring a little more fancy? If you want it to stand alone, then it needs AI and a 3 to 5 match single player "challenge the champ" ladder so that it can be played without someone else there. But that's not necessary, this is a really good party game and I'd love to see it at something like Wild Rumpus or Indiecade. Submit it everywhere!
What we'd like to do is work a lot on feedback for the player to understand the different game mechanics. Then it's all about the juice. We want it to be dripping with juice when we're done with it. @dislekcia, you're ideas are great. We just need to wrap up this boring school stuff to get back to working on this.
We're also just finalising a basic gameplay video for the IndieCade submission.
Boxer on itch.io
Oh, shit I see what you meant. The download link had disappeared for some reason. It's back now. :D
I made a gameplay video. What you think?
We've never made a linux build but we decided to do it now. It's it's not going to be a fully supported platform for the game. We just had some thoughts of putting the game on a raspberry pi. So, if you can test on Linux, please do. Let us know the outcomes.
After A MAZE there were 2 main issues we focussed on solving. Both had to do with some communication.
A) The stunned state (stars around the boxer) of the boxer was not communicated significatly to alert player something is wrong. The biggest thing the stun state is trying to do communicate You can't reach the other player! pull back and block!.
We've added a motion blur to the player that gets stunned and I think it works quite well in communicating something SERIOUS has happened to me. Although it's more significant and we've made the reach of the stunned boxer even shorter. We don't think in the crazyness of the game, the player doesn't notice the reach. Ideas, auto pull back and make reach basically 0.
B) In between rounds each player is able to recover a certain amount of health. New players don't notice the instruction. So, we made it more of a thing.
I'd like to add more to the effect like. Have the border outline flash while you're not wiggling. Then while wiggling the joysticks it stays white and has a bit of a shake as the health is going up. Basically more visual bells and whistles.
Last big change was the title screen / join screen. This solved the controller issues we were having of disconnected controllers and such. Plus we realised that there was no way of knowing who made the game after you downloaded it.
Anyway, throw that feedback.