A year in review

It's been roughly one year since we started working on the game. We thought it might be fun to gather a few gifs from along the way :)

The game idea was originally simple enough:
1. A game where the player controls the legs of a robot using analog sticks
2. One player controls legs, the other controls the arms

None of us had made physics games before so it was a big unknown for us. On top of this the game was supposed to be first and foremost a Co-op game. Combining physics and online multiplayer was a daunting task but we decided to keep working towards that goal.

First prototype

First "working" gameplay for the game.. Gotta love physics programming!

Alien Jungle

The art style was 2.5D with the gameplay being 2D but all visuals were 3D models. The 2.5D approach looked kinda promising but it just didn't support gameplay. We decided to go full-on 2D art pretty quickly.  

At first the robot had four limbs. One player would control the legs, the other would control the arms. One could play the game as single player, but it was hard to control both the feet and the arms. We all liked the idea of having arms and legs but it just didn't work so well in practice. Having four limbs was pretty overhwelming for new players. 

Techno Vampires!!

The game got a lot more easier to approach once we removed the arms. We also took a new direction with the game art. We wanted to try and make the game more action-y so we came up with this theme of "Techno Vampires" .. We planned on having fuel-sucking vampires, ghouls and evil robots for the player to fight.

We added a shooting mechanic and played around with a deathmatch mode where each player has a robot of their own. Aiming the cannon was done by tilting the body.

The shooting felt okay.. but not great. It didn't really take advantage of the robo's movement enough. After a while the direction of the game also felt a little stale so we decided to lighten things up.

Funky Robots

The third visual iteration of the game introduced an overall simpler art style. We added animated faces to the robos. Our programmer made large overhauls to the movement to make it more snappy and responsive. Things were starting to look better and better!

After the summer of 2021 we started to feel comfortable with the art style and movement in the game. Adding the Orange Heebo characters made the game a lot more cheerful and we have many ideas on how to use them in the future :)

And that pretty much brings us to the present!  The playable prototype is live on itch.io and we're planning to release a demo on Steam. We still have a lot of ideas for new mechanics and we still might make some tweaks to the games' art style and movement mechanic. 

Maybe we should add googly eyes?

Best,
Ville, Olli and Harri

P.S.: Enjoy november, folks!! It's nice and rainy here in Finland.