Monster Balls Breaker

ROLE

Game Designer / Integration

DESCRIPTION

Monster Balls Breaker is a game I created at university for a class where everyone had to make a 3 minute pitch to convince everyone on why it should be produced in teams of six. As I knew we would only have 6 weeks to produce the game, I took my inspirations from games with an arcade feel to them and who have really simple goals and controls, but could be expanded if production was going well and we could afford it. The goal of the game is to hit the ball so it hits every brick of the opponent before they hit yours. Doing so gives the player a point and reset the bricks. The player with the most points by the end of the game is the winner.

YEAR

2019

GENRE

Sports, Arcade, Couch gaming

PLATFORM

MADE WITH

Unity

The design of the game

The gameplay of Monster Balls Breaker is a mix between Lethal League and Windjammers where the characters hit a ball in an arena so it can hit the blocks of their opponent. Everytime they hit the ball, it speeds up until it reaches its limits. Once the ball has been hit by a player, it takes its color and will only affect the opponent and their blocks. If a character gets hit by the ball while it’s the opponent's color, they become stunned and won’t be able to move for a predetermined time that is affected by how fast the ball was going. To reduce the speed of the ball, the player can lob the ball which will make it go in the air so the player can hit it in a more controlled situation. To get the edge on an opponent, the player can dash to dodge the ball or catch up to it and they can use its character’s special attacks. Each character has two special attacks and the effects vary.

We wanted the different characters to feel different from one to the other and not just have the exact same moves with only visuals and special attacks to differentiate them. I’ve then set up and tried to balance the three stats we wanted each character to have which are: Strength (higher strength means making the ball go fast with less hits), speed (The character speed while walking in the arena) and dash distance (how far they go while dashing).

As we didn’t know how many characters we were going to be able to produce in the 6 weeks, we started with Count Polatouche as he is the character with the most balanced stats in the roster that we had created. We then proceeded to design 8 other characters and decided in which order we were going to produce them. Cattet was the favorite of the team and even if we initially only wanted to have the Count playable for the game, the team believed so much in the game that they’ve put their all to be able to produce and finish her in time for the deadline of the class.

Integration of the assets

As I was the designer of the game, I was put in charge of directing the game and the team. To make sure all the assets and programming was on track , I Decided to also make the integration of the assets in the game and help with the programming. This allowed me to always keep a clear view of where the game was and what needed to be done next or what might take more time to do than anticipated.

The challenge in the integration was the animator controller as it was the first time I was using it for a project in Unity. I had to learn how to make it work and how to reduce the workload for our 2D artist as they had to draw every frame of each animation by hand.The first thing we decided to cut was to have an animation for all 8 directions the player could go. We decided to instead cut it to only one and we made the visuals do a horizontal flip which made the visuals work on both sides. This decision also helped for most of the other animations.

One of the biggest things I programmed in Monster Balls Breaker was the connection between the character select to the character stats dictionary to the character controllers. I first created the dictionary and implemented every information concerning the selected character such as: strength, name of the character’s animator, speed, name of the special attacks, etc. By doing so, I was then able to feed all this information to the character controllers so it could allow the player to control any character selected.

If I could do it again

If I could do the project again, there isn’t a lot that would need to be done differently. What I would do is add what is missing from the game like most of the UI. An example would be an actual designed main menu as for now it is only barely readable text over the splash screen image. I’d also add basic options for music and the screen as well as controls for keyboard and mouse.

What I would like to add the most would be a bigger roster of characters. As said previously, we had around 6 other characters that were designed with their stats already set up and special attack designed. We just never had the time to incorporate them in the game as the team split were busy with summer jobs and we could never figure out a time to regroup and plan to keep working on the project.

Polacool

Rokurokubi