FINGER CANDY

Three piece game development team from Melbourne. Currently developing Fuball.

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GCAP 2015 Student Showcase + New Menu Screen

Hey everyone!

For those who don’t know, Fuball got recently selected to be exhibited as part of the new GCAP 2015 student showcase! We’re incredibly excited and honoured for the opportunity to show all of you what we’ve been working on these past few months.

Additionally, we’ve been working on a menu screen for Fuball so players can choose to either play a duel or team match. Check it out!

Until next time!

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Fuball Trailer

Here is the trailer for Fuball which we’re all really proud of! 

We hope you enjoy and this makes you excited for the game just as much as we are!

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A Long Overdue Update!

We’ve been super hard at work on Fuball and so I thought I’d take this moment of down time to post a long overdue update on the state of the game and its development.

So what’s changed?

Well a lot. We’ve totally revamped the control scheme, mechanics, and visual style, and it’s all been for the better.

Control scheme

Throughout the majority of development, Fuball had always been played using a twin-stick control scheme. That’s not the case anymore. Common feedback was that it was unresponsive, difficult to control and simply not fun (which is not okay.) On the technical side of things, the player’s rotation would manually change based off the right stick, and that didn’t mesh well with Unity’s physics system (which we use for the magnets.)

Now the controls have been completely overhauled. You still move with the left analog stick, but now you rotate using the left and right triggers. By holding down the triggers torque is added to the player, which makes rotating feel fluid, responsive and fun to do. Consequently, enabling your magnet is re-mapped to the ‘A’ button.

Mechanics

The most significant change made to the mechanics is the addition of aftertouch. Aftertouch allows for a deeper level of control, and lets you influence the curve of the ball after shooting. By rotating immediately after shooting, force is added to the ball for a very brief period of time, offering opportunities for really cool curve shots and tactics.

Here’s a GIF of it in action:

Visual Style

Last, but not least! The game’s visual style, and art direction has had a huge overhaul. We swapped the pastel colours, UFOs, and sports field in exchange for a much more refined, elegant, and readable art style. 

Everything in Fuball now consists of circles. The players, the ball, and the goals. As for the field? There isn’t one. The game is completely open. Players can go anywhere, and the camera will still track them. This level of freedom, in conjunction with the visual changes we’ve made makes the overall aesthetic abstract and ambiguous, which is something we think makes Fuball unique as a sports game.

We’re really proud with what we’ve achieved these past 12 weeks, and grateful for everyone who has played and followed Fuball throughout its development. We really appreciate it!

- Jadd

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Last week was our play-testing day!  We learnt a great deal from the experience. People still weren’t grasping the controls; an issue we’ve had from the very beginning. We pitch it as a twin-stick sports game, and even after understanding that people can’t play the game well. And that’s not to say it’s their fault! Even if we as the developers can play the game, if everyone else can’t very well then it’s a fault with our design.  A lot to think about, a lot to revise. Good!

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came up with new name for the game! 

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Check it!

Working on some field design and colour variations!

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New logo!

We decided to re-design the team logo! The original colour scheme and font choice was nice, but people generally didn’t seem to like it. It also didn’t really re-enforce anything about our team. With this in mind, we designed what we think is a much more aesthetically pleasing logo!

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Player ship designs!

We opted for a more flat-shaded, vector style for the player ship design, primarily for readability reasons. The in-game camera can zoom out quite a bit and as such, the size of players can be pretty small at times.

We also wanted players to be able to distinguish the four ships without the use of UI elements, player numbers, or other obvious identifiers. The solution we came up with was an alternate colour scheme for the second player of each team.

We hope you like them!

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Tackling!

You can now paddle into other players causing them to drop the ball! However, you must hit the player’s ship and not their paddle. This allows players to shield themselves with their own paddle!

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Team logo, yay! Just using a typeface called “Wahroonga” in a nice gross green.

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Up until now, the core paddle mechanic simply revolved around hitting the ball forward based off the direction of the paddle, and the specific point of the paddle’s collider which the ball hits.

After a lot of play testing, we’ve come to the conclusion that the mechanic simply wasn’t working. So, we’ve changed things.

Introducing the ‘magnet paddle!’

We’re now tinkering with an entirely new mechanic. Using Unity’s 2D physics + Point Effector 2D system, we’ve now introduced a 'magnet-like’ behaviour to the paddle. Holding down the ‘paddle button’, the ball will cling to and rotate with the paddle (provided it’s within close proximity to the front of the paddle.) By releasing the paddle button, the player will then shoot the ball forward relative to the paddle’s direction. This is designed to allow players to have a lot more control of the ball, and to encourage dribbling and passing amongst team mates.

There is no I in team.

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...and this was a bit later on the 13th of August. We’ve added a few more art assets, but really the mechanics have remained relatively the same. But, a dynamic camera! The camera we really loved. The movement of it really just made the game feel so much more alive.

At this point, we did our Week 4 presentations for the game. I feel it’s important to re-iterate that we are developing this game at university. We have a mentor, James, who is very mechanics and dynamics oriented and that’s why we’re working with him. The feedback we received was just great. We felt like we did a really good job of conveying both what we are about and what our game is about. It did however, make us look very inwardly at what the game was, and as a result a few whacky design ideas started to arise. 

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10th of August. A relatively simple but important progression.  We scrapped the 2D art assets and replaced them 3D assets (and 3D physics, still operating on just XY, no Z yet.)  The reasoning was that we wanted to add a dynamic camera and paired with 3D assets presented in a “flat” style, we could add a huge amount of depth to the style of the game. 

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Pwoah! Look at that! It’s the 6th of August and shit is moving along.  In this game we’re literally constantly tweaking player movement variables in the ongoing quest for simple, elegant flavou- I mean controls. The ball’s mass and drag and size are also often being tinkered with. So we’ve got 4 players in (which was always the intended player count), boost/afterburn and a small tweak to the paddle. And instantly we’re seeing a lot.  Paddle So I’ll quickly explain what we did with the paddle. Basically it was super difficult to hit the ball with much accuracy. The ball is rarely heading straight for the player, and almost always past them. When you trigger your paddle, it pops out slightly to hit the ball. But it just wasn’t enough and so we made it so that you now move forwards slightly too. A minor change, but with big results. You are now far more likely to collide with the ball, because you’re more likely to move into the ball’s trajectory. 

Boost We added the boost and instantly realised a couple things. We initially wanted it just as a way for the player to desperately scramble towards the ball, and always thought of it as a finite boost that would need to be recharged somehow. But it was only taking the player to travel the width of the field around 4-5 seconds anyway, so a boost was making it take only like 2-3. Because the player would somehow look to recharge this boost (we’re playing a lot of Rocket League at this point, can you tell?), it didn’t feel worth it. We’d have to slow down the pacing of the game, which at the moment didn’t seem like the right choice. 

Afterburn The dash became the answer. The dash allowed the player to rapidly move towards where the wanted to go, and players were using that almost always over the boost. So! We made it so that if you hold down the trigger after a dash, you got a little boost at the end. It really simulated that desperate last charge, an outstretch of the arm when reaching for the ball. A natural overlap in the timing of when the player can dash again and the afterburn enabling resulted in a naturally occurring afterburn-induced dash, which we loved. If the player times it right, they can actually get a better dash from it.

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Moving into early August (the 3rd)! We started to take a lot of inspiration from what Sportsfriends was doing, in particular Barabariball (not Hokra, seriously). We were also looking a lot at specific Crash Bash mini-games that revolve around deflecting and shooting marble-sized balls.

So as you can see here, we’ve made the field much larger. We got two players in there, and we added a ball. This ball represents the move away from a more abstract approach at scoring a goal that we just weren’t feeling. Shooting the player to then move them around was convoluted and frustrating a lot of the time. We also took out shooting and added paddles! Now, you simply had to knock the ball around the field to score a goal. 

At this point, we made a drastic move from a top-down shooter to a sports game. Mechanics focused games with little-to-no narrative. I like that.

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Cool! So this is from the 29th of July, and as you can see here we’ve got a very not-so-circular field. The idea we were playing with at this point was that you had these goals, and you had to shoot the enemy team to slowly incapacitate them, making them slower, weaker, and more susceptible to your bumps. You would then have to bump them into your goal; so the other players sort of became the ball. We were doing a lot of research on top-down shooters and pinball. Pinball sort of became this underlying theme we wanted to roll with for a while. 

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So, first gif! I’m posting this on the 2nd of September, and this is back from the 26th of July. At this point we had the top-down engine and basic control scheme down in it’s raw form. We had a dashing mechanic, and we had very basic art assets. Most importantly, we had an idea for the type of game we wanted to make. 

We’re three guys, and a lot of our best memories of video games come from sitting in a friend’s garage playing great local multiplayer games. So we looked a lot at Pokemon Stadium mini-games, Super Smash Bros., Crash Bash, among many others. Recently, we’re really enjoying games like Rocket League and Hotline Miami, and in the background my friends were playing a lot of Duck Game at the time. So we had criteria; fast-paced, a lot of death, and local multiplayer.