Monster Brawl: Dev Blog #1

Oct 10, 2013

I’ve started working on a new game prototype here at Hijax Games, in collaboration with my buddy Michael Leung. We’re working on a multiplayer combat arena game, with retro graphics, letting you pit legendary creatures of myth and mystery against each other.

We’ve only been working on it for a week or two, but have some great initial art in place for our first tileset, map and character, and code for the map loading, level constraints, physics and keyboard controls in. At the minute, it looks like this:

In the next dev blog post I’ll do a video run through, as that’ll feature character select and different control methods, but for now this shot will have to do!

On to the technical aspects - we’re building the game using Unity, and specifically using Futile. We’re using TexturePacker for sprite atlas creation, and Tiled for map editing. We’re then using FutileAdditionalClasses for animated sprites, and for the Tiled TMX file format support. I’ve built in additional support for custom objects from Tiled - specifically for colliders for physics, and spawn points, and soon for other in game items too. I’ll be open sourcing the changes we made to those classes just as soon as I get chance to tidy them up a bit so they’d hopefully be useful to others wanting to use Tiled and Futile together.

The physics integration was especially interesting - it took me a while to get my head around, but essentially you setup a mapping between Futile’s 2D sprites, and a 3D Unity world with game objects, colliders and rigidbodies that you’ll be used to if you’ve done any 3D Unity work. You then simply act out any input control and movement on those game objects, and update your sprites positions based on the “real world” objects, which will mean that any physics you setup have chance to take effect. It’s quite a cool concept, and the only issue I found was that I needed to set Z axis scale and depth on a lot of my objects for the physics to work properly, even though when rendered as a 2D game of course, they have no depth.

Mike has been crushing it with some great art, so now my plans on the code front are to tighten up the core mechanics, and implement character select and input select, with support for PS3 and Xbox 360 gamepads, and the keyboard. We will then roll in combat and scoring, and want to eventually look at network/online multiplayer, in addition to local multiplayer.

We’re aiming to have a finished prototype with those mechanics in, along with a few characters and maps, by Halloween. It may be that we don’t get online multiplayer working by then, but the rest will hopefully be playable, so you’ll be able to let us know what you think!

In the meantime, any questions or comments on what we’re working on, let us know on the comments here, or @HijaxGames on Twitter!

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