Game: The Brawler

The challenges of making a survival beat em up game

What's the game about?

The Brawler is a survial beat em up game where the player needs to survive the time limit where enemies will keep spawning until the time limit have reached 0. Not only that, the player need to punch certain amount of enemies in order to win. Only meeting thse 2 requirements, you're the victor!

The brawler gameplay footage

Challenges while making the game

Assets

For my Game Genre Studies 2 subject in UOWKDU, I was assigned to create a beat em up game in 4 weeks time where I have to close up the all the features that I haven't touched on or can't solve the issues like bugs within those 4 weeks. With only that limited time given, I decided to use stencyl place holder, Universal LPC Sprite sheet Generator and opengameart free assets to help myself to save time on creating new assets and focus on the mechanics on the game.

Universal LPC spritesheet generator website

OpenGameArt.org website

Enemy Behavior and how the idea of a survivial genre is born

In the first 2 weeks, I struggled a lot at making my first enemy behavior as I was fixated that since my player is a human, it would make sense to use another human as the enemy. But I would think that it will be too predicatable so I decided to use a flying robot to chase after the player and self destruct once the enemy reaches 0 while the player have to face the human enemy. This is where the survial genre idea came in. Since I'm already using the spawn wave enemy system, I decided to also add in the timer and minimum kill count in hope to spice things up a bit. This is because there's no limitation on the punches, the player can keep pressing the s button to punch however they want but with these 2 features added in, the player actually needs to kill as much enemy as they can while also surviving waves of enemies which make the game simple yet imersive.

Robot enemy behavior

Collision Box is SUPER IMPORTANT

I personally think after this exposure to this genre, Collision box is super important where one wrong design of the collison can make the game unplayable ,not fun or Overpowered. For this game, at first I thought that the defend collision for the player is just one box for the sprite but after letting the playtester played the game, I know that they can abused it all the time without any consequences. Therefore I changed the collison into the shield box will only be applied where the player is facing at and top which means the back of the body is completely vulnerable to prevent the player from abusing the shield.

Player Defend Collison Box

This also applies to the human collison box when he start punching, as you can see the image there's another small collison box added so player won't get punched to death just because the enemy is using the punching animation and player is near him.

Human Enemy Collison Box

Wave of enemy system

The size of the game is not too big (20 tiles x 15 tiles) so wave of enemy system is really crucial of balancing the game because spawning too much enemy can make the player felt overwhelmed during the previous playtesting but spawn too less can make the game unchallenging and not fair at the same time as the time is ticking down to 0 but so few enemies only spawned can make the player frustrated. Therefore I used the random integer between 3 and 5 seconds for human enemies to spawn so it would balanced out the spawn timing and won't make the player feel too overwhelmed and the number of enemy just feel right.

Spawn Human system

Conclusion

I definetly had trouble in the first few weeks coming up with intresting enemy types and behaviors that can wow the player when playing this game but because of this it helps me know that I should not fixated with just an idea even with limited resources I had, I think it's because of these limitation of assets, it forces me to think outside of the box more which I really appreciated because after figuring out the enemy types, ideas keep popping in my head and its doable, and from there onwards, it is smooth sailing until the end of development for this genre. Thank you for reading.