Dev Diary – Introduction 2011/03/10

I have been working for a reasonable time now on a game heavily rooted in brawlers, although with some interesting twists. As the first Developer’s Diary post, I shall go over what exactly are the key tenets that I held to in the making of this game.

Combat System

This, from the playtesting that has gone into it so far, is the biggest thing about the game. The combat system works like this:

There exists a map between a set of moves (currently two moves, think for example pressing up, then right) and the attack that will be executed when they are pressed.

There is a delay between keys being accepted.

You can chain together attacks, so if there are two attacks requiring up, down and down left respectively, pressing up, down, left will execute attack 1 after down is pressed and then attack 2 when left is pressed.

Story

The story is a very quiet affair dealing with a father who wants to grow closer to his daughter. That is really all that happens in the entire game. He designs this game so that he and his daughter will do something together every night, and so he would have an opportunity to talk with her.

This game is to a large extent supposed to be a parody of brawlers and a large part of that is having a story that is in no way an epic struggle of cliched characters, but instead tries to be more of an everyday scene out of a real person’s life.

One-handed play

This is actually been probably the most difficult thing to deal with. Due to it I have gone so far as to completely remove character movement, the lack of which I still fear will make the game look amateur. However, there are two main advantages to it which I simply cannot let go. The first is that two people can easily play on the same computer, which even with internet speed concerns being a thing of the past, is important. I like being able to immediately play a game with my brother, and being able to play on the same computer is the easiest way to do so, and also has a more competitive feel. The second thing is that I can play the game while drinking tea, and considering the amount of tea I drink and amount that I have to play the game, this is a necessity if I want to get anything else done in the day.

Customizable Ruleset

There are actually a large number of optional rules in the game that can be mixed and matched as desired. The story mode encourages you to keep changing the rules as that sustains the feeling of doing something new that is the game’s real selling point, but always leaves you with the choice. For matches any ruleset can be chosen, although there is a specified tournament ruleset. This is a decision that I am actually in two minds about, but considering that this game is targeted at an indie crowd, I think that it will be appreciated.

To finish, take a couple of screenshots of how it presently looks: