In September, we’ve been nominated as one of the 5 finalists of the SUBOTRON Student Live Pitch Competition 2024!Â
We had the immense honor to attend a workshop with the great Rami Ismail, which was very helpful, insightful, motivating (and our first time seeing all the other lovely contestants and their cool projects!)
It really gave us great support, and, most importantly, extreme motivation to do a bunch of hackthons in our free time to push our project even further, finally scrapping the RockPaperScissors mechanic that was just. not. working. out. for good. And it was so worth it! Chris put a bunch of work into redoing the whole mechanics and implementing an extremely cool Combo System that is easily and efficiently upgradeable by simply tweaking inside the Unity inspector, Angie did a bunch of animations, putting an especial focus on the finishing moves to help making them feel powerful, impactful and last but not least fit the silly and whacky vibe of our game (more on that below!)
Back to the final SUBOTRON event with was all about pitching, playtesting and nominating!
We all had the opportunity to showcase our games for willing playtesters and I was absolutely happy about so many people willing to spend their time trying our game <3
We didn’t end up winning, but the winner’s project “I see you” is an absolutely beautiful little gem, so their win was definitely deserved :]Â
We we’re also very pleased about the response to our game and thank the jury for their kind words and invaluable feedback.
This was the teaser that we presented at the start of our presentation, as well as the current state of our game:Â
Hopefully you, dearest gentle reader, (Um yes, I love Bridgerton, don’t you!?) think that all the combo attacks looked satisfying and cool!
Currently we have 4 unique combos, that can be achieved by.. welllll, combining strong and fast attacks, by either pressing the Left/Right Mousebutton, or on the controller with the A or B Button. The 4 mentioned combo attacks are the following: *drumroll please*
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Feedback Frenzy
In this Combo, Greg stretches out both his hands, they get huuuuge, and after a short anticipation phase he smacks them together, complete with a satisfying slap sound and of course a cool VFX!
(Really glad we opted for this Rayman kind of armless approach for his character design, which was a godsend for this one! ^^)
Skull Strike
Greg reaches out for his head, pops it off, and, in a bowling fashion, throws it in front of him, dealing heavy, precise damage!Â
Not as easy to hit as the other combos, but with a huge range and, if hit, the deadliest of all the attacks!
Take that, rude soul residues. Ha
Sinister Sprint
Review
In this so aptly named attack Greg rises into the air and smashes his scythe down with the utmost force, knocking up enemies, dealing heavy damage and leaving them stunned for a bit.
Important to note is his scythe gets stuck in the earth and has to be pried out, so the fury unleashed is a trade off with his HP if he doesn’t take his current circumstances into consideration!
Brainstorm
Another tribute to the gods of puns.
(Get it?? because of the workforce term AND this actually creates a storm???… anyway)
Pretty much the tried and tested whirlwind attack (Thanks Link!) that does a great job at pushing enemies out of your path, helps with picking up orbs and in general gives you a breather.
I already talked about Chris’ implementation of the combo system above, he added a very cool system that lets you handcraft the combos very easily and efficiently, complete with assigning individual input patterns, animation clips, sounds and VFX!
I already talked about Chris’ implementation of the combo system above, here’s a quick screenshot of the current state in the inspector:
This is the configuration file for the skull strike attack.
“Attack stages” is where you put the Animation Override Controller (basically where you drag and drop the clip) needed for each attack inside the combo.
Input sequence lets you set how the combo works, in this case Fast Attack, Strong Attack, Fast Attack.
The additional Damage Option lets you add a multiplicator for each part of the combo, usually mostly focusing on the finisher. In this case the attack is super strong because it’s not as easy to hit as the others, but if you do it right you can even snipe distant enemies! :]
Additionally, you can add unique sound effects and fitting VFX effects, that get instantiated whenever there’s the animation event in the respecive clip.
Very cool for easily hand crafting combos that give the whole thing a unique flair and might make dedicated players recognize them after a while! 🙂
Another cool thing we added (mainly Chris!) is the outer game loop, consisting of the HR menu, which of course means Haunted Resources (and yes, we are obsessed with this joke)
The elemental attacks that were charged up before are now purchasable in there. The idea is that combo finishers are the most effective way of charging the attacks, normal attacks should still do that too, but not nearly as fast, which should give the player further motivation to use the combos a lot (other than pure, destructive, unstable FUN!!)
It is still WIP, our idea is upon selecting the HR screen the camera pans to the side (now a UI element is set active) and reveals a middle aged grumpy spooky office lady, revoking a similar vibe as the slug madame from Monsters Inc.:
Hehe. Love you Roz, you da best.
(Image & character 100% belongs to Disney from it’s awesome movie Monsters Inc., easly my favourite Pixar movie of all time!!!!
If you haven’t watched it yet I suggest you stop whatever you’re doing right now (after reading this obviously) and get to it immediately, preferably on the GREATEST streaming platform of all time, Disney+!
Truly the GOAT.
Hope that’s enough to not get sued.)
The shop looks pretty similar to the final draft from the gamejam but has also seen a bunch of polishing and additions, mainly Info on ghost stats as well as Tiny Dim, got a reroll button and right now features 40 items.
Next things we plan to add/get done:
- fix the annoying rotation bug that of course after being unable to reproduce it ourselfes happened to all the playtesters ^^
- implement the combos into the bootcamp (tutorial level)
- rework Big Monster (still gamejam version
) - add more enemy types
- add more attacks
- rework Rusty a bit to fit the new combos (you had to counter him with the RPS before)
- combine nearby particle effects (currently a performance bottleneck)
- a bunch of tweaks and quality-of-life improvements
- add way more assets for the archive to actually look like an archive, use the assets to make the arena smaller in earlier waves (naturally fits the narrative: you clean up the soul residues so ofc it looks more tidied up over time/waves)
- … others I can’t think of right now.