Bounce House Brawlers: Blog 4

Final Progress of Bounce House Brawl

Bounce House Brawl came a long way and has ultimately come to an end now since we have reached the end of the semester. I was the game lead for the team as well as a level designer. I'll focus more on level design in this post, but I will talk about few things I did as a project lead as well. 

Since last time I went ahead and made two more levels for the game. I showed the annotated map for one of the levels which was the jungle level and there were a few changes that went into the level. The other level I have made a map for but I haven't posted it here before.

Here is a look at the two new levels that I made:

The first jungle level I made revolves mainly around the water and logs of the level. This is a two player only map due to how hectic it would be with 4-Players. Ultimately players want to try and stay up within the top area to avoid being close to the water. However, if they are fighting and get knocked down they have a decent chance of landing on a log that will save them. Players will want to get directly back up to the other platforms as soon as possible to stay away from death but your opponent will most likely be coming in to secure the kill.

I actually ended up doing the water for this level too. If you guys are curious about how I did it, basically I wanted a more stylized/cartoon water. So I went into photoshop and created a water texture that tiled fairly well. The size was 2048x2048. After it was painted I then dropped it into Unity and made some planes. I put the texture on the planes and added a simple UV scrolling script to it so the texture would move. After I did that I duplicated and dragged a few out to create the water that you see in the scene.

The second jungle level revolves more around stagnant hazards which are the spikes in the corners and the middle of the room. I did a level that didn't require any work from programming that way it would lighten up the load on our programmers. This level can be played with up to 4-Players and has a lot more room to it. 

I was going to add a particle effect to the eyes of the tikis in this level because I think it looks aesthetically pleasing and helps the environment pop a little more but ultimately I scrapped the idea because I was concerned it would confuse the players in thinking that it was a hazard. 

The other two levels that I had shown earlier in my progress had some tweaks and changes made to them too.

For the first forge level with the lava, I went ahead and did a texture swap because we were just using temp art for it. I actually did some color changes to the water texture that I had made and applied the same logic I did for the water to the flowing lava. I also went ahead and added some chains to the environment to give it some more life. 

I also changed it so the walls stay open longer and more frequently on this level, which gives players more opportunities to kill the opponent. I then widened the level up a little bit to give players more room as well because it felt a bit cramped before. Then I also changed the level so that eventually two doors start opening instead of just one.

For the second forge level, I did a texture update so that the conveyor belts match the forge level more. I also went ahead and added the chains to this level as well. 

We initially changed the grates so they heated up and played a fire particle effect when they were on but near the end of development the level kept crashing, so we ultimately scrapped the particle effect and made it so they grew much brighter. The particle effect made it a lot more clear to the players that it was a hazard but we had to cut it because we couldn't figure out why it was crashing the game. 

I also brought in the platforms because players would often get stuck in the two bottom right corners which was frustrating, so I pulled them in to prevent that from happening.

Besides the four levels that I worked on, I was mainly focused on managing the game and getting it to where it needed to be at the end of the semester. The last few weeks we spent a lot of time polishing and bug fixing to make the gameplay as smooth as possible.

Ultimately my overall vision of the game changed and adapted as the semester went on to accommodate our skill levels and the limited time we had. However, I think the game overall turned out pretty well for creating it in a little over 3 months. Other people seemed to think so as well because it got 1st place at the Excellence in Computer Graphics Awards this year.

I appreciate my team's hard work and dedication this semester. I couldn't have made the game without them. I learned a lot during my time as a project lead and am looking forward to using that knowledge in my future projects.

But you guys can check out the final product here: https://cagd.itch.io/bounce-house-brawl

I posted dev blogs and patch notes regularly there too if you wanted to check out how the game came to be and the timeline of our progress.