Bounce House Brawlers: Blog 3

Progress 4/12 - Bounce House Brawlers

Bounce House Brawlers has come a long way since my last blog post. I'm continuing to lead the team to help make the game the best it can be. We have gone through another couple of iterations of the game and made some decent progress. However, I'll be going over the level design I have been doing for the game and how that has been implemented thus far.

During this time I have actually gone through and implemented two of my forge levels from the last blog post. The levels that were implemented were the levels with the heated grates and the level with the moving walls that open up sections of the lava pools.

Here is a look at the two levels:

Implementation of these levels wasn't too hard but they definitely still need to be balanced a bit more. One of the issues we ran into was the weekend that I needed the level mechanics from programming, my programmer had to work on another extra project of the weekend for Lidar Scanning. So he wasn't able to get me the level mechanics in working condition by the time I needed them. Ultimately he got the mechanics to work and in the build, but I was not able to tweak and adjust them for balance.

A couple of the things that I'm currently in the process of changing to balance the levels are making the grates heat up faster in the first forge level. I'm also making it so the two conveyor belts on the right move the player to the right instead of the left. I've moved the two platforms inward so they player doesn't get stuck under them as easily when they are fighting. Lastly, I have made the grates stay on longer. It also needs some visual changes because players weren't clear on when the grates were on and could kill you. So I've talked to Xavier about displaying a particle effect of fire when they turn on and a particle effect of smoke when they turn off.

I went ahead and made this particle effect for when the grates turn on:

For the second forge level, I need to make sure that there is a wall open pretty much at all times. So, I'm considering having two walls move at a time to give players more options because the matches tended to go fairly long. Players overall seemed to really enjoy the mechanic of this level and enjoyed having to switch up where they were fighting to kill the enemy player.

Our modelers are pretty much done with the assets for all the other levels. So, I have been drafting up ideas for new level themes. One of my teammates suggested that we do "Origin" levels for the characters and I thought it was a really good idea so I went ahead and drafted up a quick map of my idea of the origin map for Boxzilla. 

Here is a look at that:

The idea is that you are in a Jungle like theme because Boxzilla is much like a gorilla. However, another goal of mine was not to introduce too many new level mechanics because that all has to be programmed in. The wooden platforms will sway back and forth depending on how the player gets knocked into them and jumps on them. The logs at the bottom will move to the left constantly throughout the match making it so players can land on them, this is to give players a final chance. The blue represents the river which is the hazard of the level that players can be knocked into.

I've made an asset list for the level as well as introduced a couple of new themes that we could do for the game. 

Currently I'll be working on implementing this level this weekend and hopefully, we can get the origin maps in for the other characters soon. I'll also be balancing and tweaking my other levels accordingly.

The game is coming along pretty well so far and I'm happy with the direction it's heading. If you want to check out more updates on the development of the game head to:  https://cagd.itch.io/bounce-house-brawl