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[dougvfx]

Title

ThumbderDome Wrestling

Character Select Screen

Thumb Movement

Sample Pin Move

Game Description
A thumb wrestling game in which two players use one controller to battle it out in the squared circle.
Players must win best out of three. Each time a player is pinned it requires more "wiggle" to free themselves. The opposing player can "wiggle" as well to fight back to keep you down while still holding down on a trigger which will invoke a pin. The first few times, the pinned player will be able to escape fairly easily but it gets harder and harder the more times you're pinned. I'm also looking for feedback as I try to finish this thing up.

Why
I should have posted here sooner. I have been working on this game for a little over two weeks and just wanted to be able to share the rest of the progress here. I have another project I'm working on but the scope is really ambitious and this is something I wanted to finish in under a month if possible. Therapeutic I would say. I'm getting closer but I wanted to devlog the rest of the way. Also watch as I deal with sound effects and music which is something that frightens me. Apologies if I've done something wrong posting this being so far along.

Things Left To Do
[X]Intro/Splash Screen.
[X]Create A Launch Trailer.
[X]Create losing/winning taunt screen. This will include some text below the character that won
[X]Add pause button and menu. This will require being able to still animate pause menu objects while timescale is 0.
[X]Create icon to tell player to wiggle joystick
[X]Character Select Screen needs ui signaling the match is starting.
[X]Animate some things on the start screen. It needs more life.
[X]Need music for game implemented .
[X]Need sound effects for moves and so forth.
[X]Fix skinning issues on hand. Some animations show verts being pulled to sharp points.
[X]Fix cameras in match scene. they need to be almost the same just opposite ends. right now one is higher than the other and so forth.
[X]Put in an animation when a player loses a round. Could be one shakes out their hand and the other does something else before coming back together.
[X]Fix issues with struggle meter.
[X]Flip the second player cam so it looks like a right hand.

Audio
Need audio music and sound effects
[X]Music for intro and start screen
[X]Music for losing screen
[X]Music for continue screen
[X]Music for character select screen
[X]Music for wrestling match scene
[X]Sound effect for selecting a character
[X]Sound effect for swapping between characters(just simple ding effects)
[X]Sound effect for Hammer hitting steel effect
[X]Sound effect for lightning strike effect
[X]Sound effect for Lucas Libre super pin
[X]Sound effect for escaping a pin
[X]Sound effect for losing anim of character hitting ring mat(wrestling impact sound)
[X]Sound effect for monster masher pin. Maybe some kind do filtered animal
[X]Sound effect for missing a pin attempt

Completed Game
http://www.dougmakesgames.com/thumbderdome-wrestling/

[dougvfx]

Update to Pinning Mechanic
After some playtesting with some people I decided to try a new way of determining a winner. Instead of a three count I decided to have two meters, one on each side for each player respectively. When a player gets pinned their meter begins to fill. They have to make rotations with the joystick to escape the pin and the more their meter is filled the harder it is to get out of the pin. The fun thing with this setup is if you are just on the cusp of losing you could end up pinning the other player and make a comeback. I think this could make for some cool comeback scenarios and those are always my favorite in competitive games. I also added a circle meter that pops up when you get pinned to let you know how much you need to rotate to get out of a pin. I will make these smaller and include the joystick graphic that I'm still working on.

[dougvfx]

Change to pin struggle meter
I changed the pin struggle meter. Instead of having two bars on both sides that must be filled there is one at the top again except it follows the rules of the previous iteration. it starts in the middle and as player get pinned the bar is pushed to their side for the duration of the pin. The pinned player still has to wiggle the joystick to free themselves. I play tested this today and immediately it made a huge difference in the gameplay. One person was almost down and out but cam back and ended up winning.

Updated art for wiggle UI
I added some updated art to the wiggle joystick UI. It now has an animation to tell you to rotate the joystick. really you just need to move it as fast as you can but rotation is the most efficient.

Round Win Animation
I added an animation at the end of each round. The winner slams their fist down on the loser. I was thinking it would be cool to have some awesome finishing move unique to the character and cut to a single view camera of the move and cut back to the action. Problem is I'm not a great animator so that will take some time. We'll see how this feels first.

Misc
I added some simple camera flashes in the darkness of the level to give the illusion of camera flashes from the crowd. I also flipped the second player camera so it would look like a right hand so the player on the right of the control will feel more visually in tune with their character. I started working on audio but haven't found the right clips yet. I had found some good ones but the order processing on the site was all messed up and led to me having to call my credit card company and make sure I didn't have 7 duplicate purchases on my account. good times.

[dougvfx]

Update: A Bunch of Stuff
I've been busy. Not sleeping much. Making games. I added some music and sounds but I'm still not happy with the music and I'm currently looking into other areas for some really cool music. I tweaked some of the UI elements and got more feedback through playtesting. Something I've started work on as well is the winning/Losing Taunt Scene. This is a simple scene where the winning player is in their winning pose and they say something snarky to the loser. Like Street Fighter 2 back in the day. They'll have some text soon but I'm still writing silly crap for them to say.

Special Cameras

I added some cameras to cut to when a special move is invoked and some slow mow time stuff. This is starting to add some more excitement to the matches. Especially for the spectators. Here are some examples.

Cameras Used When Special Activated

Speed Lines

I created a speed line effect when the player is pinned instead of having text. The text was distracting and confusing to the players. I also added a red vignette for each player when they get pinned and moved the UI element for wiggling the joystick so that it shows up right in the players view line and doesn't draw their vision to the side.

[jamesprimate]

this is a hilarious and awesome concept. the style is perfect too!

[oodavid]

Very stylish, makes me think of the Master Hand from Super Smash Bros.

I'd play this to settle disputes...

[dougvfx]

Thanks for the replies! I'm really excited to find some great music to pair with it.

[dougvfx]

Updated the Character Lose Screen

I added some music and text that it randomly chooses when the scene starts. I'm still writing up quotes but the code is obviously setup to allow me to plug in as many as I want. Nothing complicated.

Updated fonts and font colors

After some feedback I decided to go with a slightly different font. In the theme of the 80's era golden age of wrestling I created these gradient colors for the fonts to look like that synthetic poster painted chrome look that a lot of beveled fonts had in the 80's. I also adjust the player 1 and player 2 ui text objects to just read p1 and p2 and placed them next to the struggle meter to better associate each meter side with the respective players and and to have less clutter.

Updated the fire effect

I updated the fire texture in my fir material for Moscow Mules special pin move to look more toon like to stay in theme with everything else character/look wise. I also updated the pause menu. It was looking bland So I threw some 80's all over it's face.

[TheChaoticGood]

This game would be perfect with a power glove.

[dougvfx]

Update 8-24-14

As I get closer to gold on this thumb wrestling game I find myself tweaking as much as I can to make things better. So very quickly here are a couple things I did today. I updated the character select scene by adding a background for the character icons to sit on. They were just floating there and I needed to have them grounded to something. This neon magenta scan-line art I've been using throughout my game for other UI elements works well and it keeps the visual theme locked in. I also updated the texture for Grave Digger and Monster Masher. The Grave Digger texture now has these silly drawn in bones like someone wearing a skeleton t-shirt and monster masher has blood spatter on the texture. I changed player 1's selection color to be an orange-ish-yellow since this is a theme I've used for player 1 in my update to the UI in general. Likewise, player 2 is now a neon blue to match the UI updates.

Moving on. I've created and implemented the control layout/help screen. Each time you progress from the main screen this screen pops up to show players how to play the game. The controls aren't complicated and I really should add this screen to the pause menu options in the main wrestling scene but time is tight so we'll see. I sill need to make a small credits screen in the start scene.

Lastly, I animated a few things in the start scene to give it a little life. I added some movement to the glare elements and a sheen swipe effect that moves over the main text every 3 seconds or so.

[dougvfx]

Complete

As of now the game is complete. I and a couiple friends even made a commercial for the game. Making the commercial was a really fun side project to the whole thing. Overall I'm happy with the way things turned out. I decided to give the game away for free as there were too many issues popping up while trying to sell the game. I hope people play it and enjoy it. Here is a link to the games page on my site.

http://www.dougmakesgames.com/thumbderdome-wrestling/

There were some things I fixed and made better before I released the game.

1. Fixed the framerate issues on the Mac version.

2. Changed some UI stuff to support 16:10 aspect ratio.

3. Updated the win counters.

4. Completely overhauled the split screen implementation.

5. Made a commercial.