TIGSource Forums

Overview
Shadow Fencer Theatre is the competitive awkward physics sword fighting game set in the world of shadow puppets.

Take center stage with a unique cast of characters and make your way to become a Grandmaster of the theatre. Perform solo or battle a friend in a veritable variety show of game modes and skits. Whether you are a one-puppet show or sharing the stage, above all else, show the world you are the best performer on the shadowy screen.

Acting 101: Be sure to point the pointy end away from you and towards your opponent. When all else fails, just do a cheeky sword throw.

What are the Features?
Single player and local two player fencing combat
Story - Find out what it takes to keep a last-of-it’s-kind shadow puppet theatre in business.
Marathon - Survive the gauntlet and become a Grandmaster.
Improv - Quick play by yourself or with a friend, selecting the cast, stage and direction of the shadowy fight. Direct the Improv fights with a selection of gameplay variations, limits and more.
Skits - a proverbial vaudeville of mini-games set to delight and distract.
Over 16 selectable characters:
Robots, Giraffes, Pirates and more! An eclectic cast so big we needed a larger dressing room!
8 Unique Stages:
Behold the power of paper cutouts on sticks and string, and their uncanny ability to set the stage and tell a story. The magic of the theatre!
Original Soundtrack:
A collection of musical notes played specifically for this game!

Shadow Fencer Theatre (http://"http://www.shadowfencertheatre.com") is being developed by ShuddaHaddaLottaFun (http://"http://www.shuddahaddalottafun.com").

** Originally posted on LudumDare.com  -- Posting here to show how we started, and float along in the tasty memories.**

Ah, where to begin?... Perhaps, the beginning!
I was born in a poor, small fishing village off the coast of… what?  Not that beginning? Oh, I see...

The date was December 9th, 2016.  It was the start of Ludum Dare 37 – One Room. Our initial concept was to create a goofy fighting game with paper figures attached to popsicle sticks. You know, the ones that have push pins in the joints so they flop about. It was a concept that I had rattling in my head for a bit, and chance would have it, the theme actually fit the idea! It’s a game about a kid in their room acting out battles! This was a first since there was not a lot of time spent ideating, and I could just start prototyping. The art man was unavailable until Sunday, so I pushed forward to make my wobbly fighting game using old concept art as my basis.

And then there was art...
When the art man came on board I regaled him with what’s what, and sent him on his way to figure out the art and characters and such. Luckily for me, he came up with the idea to make it look like a shadow puppet theatre!  So good!


This concept & art style solved our two biggest issues with Game Jam development.
Issue #1 – Scope
We make things too big, and then they don’t work, and are incomplete, or we cut so much stuff back that we sort of just have a thing. This game had a simple mechanic that I could just make, you know, work.
Issue #2 – Not enough Art because of Issue #1
With too big of a scope, there’s not enough time to make all the art. We have stuff missing, or even worse, I help out and then the art style is all over the place.  This game had a vision! We could make stuff that all fit!

Our First Multiplayer
Another thing to note was this was our first multiplayer game. We knew it would be more fun with two people playing, and playing on controllers as well. We developed for controllers, which ended out making the keyboard controls a little awkward… sorry. Also developing on a Mac to make joysticks to work on a PC with HTML5 is, well, silly.

So that’s it, we had a thing were all the pieces finally fell together… still with a few bugs of course, plus the sound effects and music, but that is another tale for another time.



Ok ok… enough with the flashback.  Next update is going to be new things.  Maybe even shiny things.

From the moment I have read "Mouth Noises" I knew I had to test this game!

And from what I testes I was quite impressed. The gameplay seems "clunky" at first, but that for me just adds to the charm of the whole experience, kind of like QWOP, but in a non-infuriating way.

The art fits the theme quite well, though I would think it would be interested to explore some concepts within the same room, such as:

• What would happen if one player stabbed the hand that's holding the other puppet?

The only thing that I didn't like in the demo, was the fact that if you chose the number of players, there was no button to return to the main menu  :P

Overall, I am quite interested in seeing how the project will evolve!

Thanks for checking it out Vanethos!  The current build is the early jam game, so we are obviously changing a lot, but we are glad you like what you see so far!

Also, the stabbing the hand thing is brilliant!  Like, put it on the agenda brilliant.

Now that Ludum Dare 37 is over and down with, we continue on in this Post-Jam world to try and improve Shadow Fencer Theatre as much as possible.  The first thing: Controls.  The original versions controls were pretty limited, which only movement back and forth, and it wasn’t smooth at all. 

We re-did the controls, and added jumping and ducking to the movement.  We are a bit limited in what we can accomplish with movement while still making it look like a hand controlling a shadow puppet figure on a stick, but I think we have something pretty good looking.

The GIF is a bit choppy, but the new controls allows you to use the analog joystick to smoothly move up and down and left and right…. And all the angles in between.

Until next time! - :beer:

Ok… we might change the name at some point, but for now… we’ve added a new character!  Captain Beard is a pirate.  I know, it’s crazy.



One of the things we want to introduce with each character is a slightly different feel for combat and movement.  Dr. Mix-a-Bot, our robot character, is currently our well-rounded baseline character.  Jack Rabbid, the evil looking bunny, is designed to be quicker, but has a shorter sword (carrot).  Rabbid’s play-style is about closing the gap between your opponent quickly.

Capt. Beard on the other hand is a slower character with a bigger, and heavier sword.  We are constantly tweaking this, but it definitely makes play more interesting with the variation.  We just got to make sure no character is TOO good… or bad really!

I saw this somewhere recently and thought it looked really amazing! Look forward to more.

That's a very unique art-style you have there.

I'm curious to see how this will turn out :)

Thank you!  We are curious as to how this will turn out as well!  ;D

Quick little post here to say we have had our first bit of publicity already.  A little blurb about our game was written up in the article showcasing #ScreenshotSaturday games.

http://www.hardcoregamer.com/2017/01/15/screenshot-saturday-featuring-skycurser-cool-swords-in-caves-many-more/243251/

Now that we are properly famous, we will only continue to work if our trailer is stocked with blue M&Ms... ONLY BLUE!

Let us start this by trying to explain why we did things the way we did.  During the jam as we were designing the game, a decision was made about the sword interaction.  The idea was that it’s a fencing game, so you should try and stab your opponent with the tip of your sword.  So, an invisible collider was created called the “Sword Point”.  If this point hit the other sword, it would push the sword away.  If the point hit the opponent’s body, it would kill the opponent.  Simple enough.

What does this mean?  Well, it meant that players could miss their opponent by swinging the sword over or under them. So the sword would be overlapping but not killing.  It made sense at the time, as we just saw it as the sword being in front of the opponent, not in them, just with shadow puppets it looked like it was inside the opponent…. Well…



Playtest Says Otherwise.

The feedback we got was “hey, swords broken, doesn’t kill sometimes”.  Well, we listened, and made sure that the sword contact was a kill as well.  What does this change? Gameplay is quicker, since it’s easier to make contact.  The sword point is still there, and still pushes away the other sword, so stabbing is still very important.   You need to try and stab at the opponent’s sword without touching tips* so you can push their sword away and get the kill. 


And it’s how the game should have been…. Hey, we all make mistakes.  Especially Jacob, that guy makes like ALL of the mistakes….






*No Comment

One of the cases where an art style just fits so perfectly with gameplay. Looks excellent.

Thanks RofB! We are really happy people are liking the look of the game!

Our latest character is Koral the mermaid.  She is the co-star of the theatre’s sea shanty alongside Capt. Beard.  The world of Shadow Fencer Theatre is made up of a number of tales as told by our narrator, each with it’s own set and 2 “cast members”.


What makes Koral really unique (well, as of now when there is only 4 characters) is her trident.  By holding the trident near the center, her weapon is more balanced, allowing her to recover quickly.  Also, if her opponent hits her weapon away, the back of the trident can be there to protect her, or even get the kill.


Because we are relying on 2d Physics for a lot of the interaction, it’s super cool to see how a new character will play once we put the art in with colliders and rigidbodies.  Now to start working on our sea set.

As you know I utterly adored this game over at Ludum Dare. The style/artwork is just fantastic, I honestly look forward to seeing more and more future updates. The new characters look so charming, it fits really well!

This looks so weird, and intriguing, and fun. I'm curious to see how it'll develop :D

In the jam version of our game, the playing field was just a horizontal bridge.  So that meant we could just have our idle Y-Position locked in, and the player moves left and right from that.  Well, as we start designing new set pieces for our characters to fight in, we wanted to make sure we can have some variety in the “floor” shape that the characters rest on.  So, added a gameobject collider to act as our weight, guiding the characters along the ground.

Here is a little sneak preview of our new set. 

@sinclairstrange and @maruki.... I forgot to say thank you for your comments!  Imma jerk.

Anyway this is sort of a no-post.  Was planning to do a devlog with a fancy new gif, but was busy re-doing a music track.  Somehow the save button on this computer broke itself temporarily... technology, am I right?

Anywoo this weekend will be a bit of a crunch as we wrap up the state of the current build to show off at a local event (if anyone is around Eastern Iowa let me know.... no one?  ok).  But we will have time to show off new characters and stuff, so that will be good.


After we get a couple of new characters and arenas in, the next plan is to update the menu system.  Currently using Unity's built in event system, but it seems that it's not going to play well with wanting to have a character select menu that both players can control.  :waaagh:

Raise the Anchor! Hoist the Barnacle! Harness the… Stick!  It’s time for an old fashion Sea Shanty!



The first pass on our pirate ship arena is in the game.  In this scene, players battle it out on the high seas as the ship rocks in the waves.

**ShuddaHaddaLottaFun is not liable for cases of seasickness due to hyper-realistic effects.**

And what’s a pirate’s life without an old fashioned sing-a-song? Well we’ve got that in the works too!

https://soundcloud.com/mrshoestore/shadow-fencer-theatre-sea-shanty (https://soundcloud.com/mrshoestore/shadow-fencer-theatre-sea-shanty)



***If anyone knows how to embed soundcloud on these forums, let me know! I'd much prefer that.

He’s an astronaut.  And he has a space wrench… so…. Pretty much the perfect character.  Don’t even need to spend a lot of time naming the guy if he’s an astronaut with a space wrench.  Just call him “Commander” something, and you are good to go.  I mean, common, he’s an astronaut! Eats out of tubes! Pees in a vacuum!  What’s not to like?

Plus, we’ve got this GIF


Oh yea, he’s a slightly slower, floaty character.  He lives in space. 

Update Time!  We are in a push to make an updated demo for a local event in 2 days, which became a much bigger issue then it should have been.  We just needed to add in one more character and arena (which we will post about when we get the time to make beautiful screenshots) but once we did and tested the game... a whole lot of broken showed up.

First off was 2 player mode was broken.  I had been testing all by my lonesome for so long that I didn't realize that the switch to check which game mode was set wasn't actually changing in/out the AI scripts with the player control scripts.  I'm still not sure why that stopped working, but a deadline is a deadline so I had to go through each individual character (6 of them now) and hardcode the change up.

Second was my computer was starting to run slow... I blamed the computer... because it's old.  But nope, it was (mostly) the fact that I was doing about thrice as many 2D physics as I needed.  As I scaled and made changes, I never corrected the things I didn't need.  So, deleted some colliders, changed some polygon colliders to boxes, and made a bunch of rigid bodies static and ta-da.... back to normal.

The original plan was to put this demo online, replacing our original jam version that's out there.  But things are not going to be quite where we want them for our event, so we may push back the online upload a bit to polish up.

Then we get back to it, more characters, more arenas, and hopefully with the feedback from the event plus when we  post online, we will fine tune this mother-fudger.   :gentleman:

But enough time wasting! I want to get this puppy finished tonight, and I also want to sleep.... both of these things cannot happen at once unless clones.

Hey everyone!  Been a bit quiet the last few days, mostly due to working on a new build of the game for a small local event, InnovateDBQ.  We had around 75 people check out the game, and got some good feedback.  It was also good seeing groups of people come back over and over to play again.  That’s always a good feeling.   :)

We did not however get good pictures of the event though.  When we’d have a big group of people playing, we got busy talking with folks, and forgot to take pics.

So now we are going to mull over the feedback, and plan out our next steps. Figure out the changes or additions to the core gameplay mechanic to make the game the best we can.  But before that, we are going to fix a couple of bugs from this build, and update the web version hosted on Itch.io.  That should be within the next week, so stay tuned for that.  We are going to be asking for some playtesting and feedback, and would love if you are able to help!

Working to finish up a few bugs for the web build so we can push it out to get more feedback, including fixing this bug that spawned a copy of every AI player characters....


Maybe we should turn it into a game mode!

New build will be out soon! Stay tuned!

Behold! Bloorgan the Mighty!  Commander Jeff stands no chance against this alien lord…. Or does he?  He might… depends on the player really….

So, Bloorgan uses it’s tentacle as it’s “sword” which as of now is the only character that does that.  We plan to make updates to the design of this character since we are not 100% satisfied, maybe replace it’s legs with more tentacles.  But for now Bloorgan is in the game, and will be part of the new demo which we will post tomorrow most likely.

Hello Everyone! We’ve been talking about a new demo of the game for a little bit now, but we are glad to say it is finally available for you to play!  Please check it out!

Please tell us all of your feedback, good and bad, because we would love to know what people think.


We put this build together in part for a local event we did, but also as part of the Finally Finish Something Jam on Itch.io.  It helped us to have a deadline to bring the game up to a more polished point that we were happy with.  We also really wanted to update the game online because we get people playing it everyday, but they are missing out on what the game is today. 

Hello Everyone!  Just wanted to let everyone know that we have not disappeared off the face of the planet like extras on the show The Leftovers.  Granted, we have not put in as much time on this as we would like, but changes and improvements have been made.  For instance:

• Completely overhauled the physics in game to provide a better feel of control while still maintaining the goofy wobbly action.
• Reworked the AI to be smarter and actually react to the players action instead being a sequence of random events.
• Added a disarming mechanic that can...dis-sword… your opponent.
• Added a Throw Sword mechanic for those that don’t like to keep nice things.

As well as some other improvements here and there.  This is all over a period of something like 6 months, so really not as much as we wanted.  Life caught up ya know? But here’s the thing; we started working on this more a couple weeks ago or so… and then, we got a nice unsolicited (as far as we know) post on alphabetagamer.com (http://"http://www.alphabetagamer.com")

Here’s a link! We are super happy about it!

http://www.alphabetagamer.com/shadow-fencer-theatre-beta-demo/ (http://www.alphabetagamer.com/shadow-fencer-theatre-beta-demo/)

We still don’t understand why this article out of nowhere, but we are super thankful, especially since it kicked off a new round of Youtuber Let’s Plays!

https://youtu.be/DhyKkubBlhI (https://youtu.be/DhyKkubBlhI)

https://youtu.be/_6YGtUHhtiQ  (https://youtu.be/_6YGtUHhtiQ)

(if anyone wants to translate the overall vibe on this one from Russian to English, we’d appreciate that! Otherwise we’ll assume it’s just overwhelmingly positive).

We want to thank everyone who has talked about our game, made videos, and everyone who has played our demo on itch.io. We also want to let those that enjoy our game that we are actively working to make it bigger and better and making it a quality product.

Cheers,
ShuddaHaddaLottaFun Team

This reminds me of the into to Battleblock Theaters game. Clever!!

Oh boy…. So, apparently I wrote a devlog update to post back in December 2017 about how bad we are at doing updates… and then I never posting the darn thing!

So now it’s been 6 months since our last update!!! That’s real bad.

So this is the list of changes to Shadow Fencer Theatre we were supposed to post about:

• Improved joystick support (thanks Rewired)
• Rumble!
• New (still temp) menu to allow better selections. Meaning Player 2 can select their own character. And if playing solo you can select AI difficulty.
• Oh yea, Character select… that wasn’t in there before. (we call it “Casting”)
• And Set select.  (we call it “Scenery”)
• 8 new characters added (up to 14 total, only 2 more to go!)
• 1 set added (3 total, 5 left to go!)
• Music created for 5 sets (some still WIP)
• Changed scoring system from points to lives, which we are calling “Takes”.  Each time you get stabbed, you are basically messing up the play’s story, so the director will have you use up one of your takes.
• Added an “Extra Take” rule that makes it so players have to win by 2.
• AI scripting adds random attacks to reduce some predictability.
• Improvements on some physics performance by switching out collider types.
• Set a max velocity to the sword throwing, helps with blocking.
• Recorded and editing SFX for character deaths
• And finally added a rotation to the characters when they move past each other.  It was actually a rare occurrence so we never added it.
• Added a new death transition that looks like curtains closing.
• Added SFX for individual character selects.

There was more done, but since we didn’t start tracking stuff until recent, well…. It’s hard to remember.  Most of that was behind the scenes stuff, not necessarily additions, but making it easier to work with. Can’t believe I never used Playmaker templates before….


And then this is the list of changes we wanted to talk about for THIS devlog:

• Fixed sword collision after death
• Up’d the movement speed/mobility of the characters
• Fixed some rumble issues when characters are AI
• Tweaked the Physics to make them barely better
• Improved AI
• Numerous other bug fixes including making sure the AI attacks correctly when they rotate
• Demo loop that triggers when menu is idle (shows off the gameplay)
• Animations for transitions, etc.
• New Set - Castle!
• New Set - Graveyard!
• New Set - Wild West!
• New Set - Zoo!
• Updated the City Set
• Visualized a popup for Extra Takes
• New Character - Jusborn the Frail (wizard)!
• New Character - Butch Cactusi (a cactus… man?)!
• Animations on the menu
• A new ShuddaHaddaLottaFun website! (www.shuddahaddalottafun.com)
• A new Teaser Video for Shadow Fencer Theatre
• And probably more….

Holy cow, that’s a bunch of text.  Here, how about watching our new teaser video

Shadow Fencer Teaser Trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOTo1f1W2D0)


In more super rad news, we are going to GDC! Shadow Fencer Theatre was selected as an Indie Game being showcased at the Intel booth on the expo floor!  We are super excited to be showing off our game in our first major public showing!  

We have much to do until then, and will be very busy.  The plan is to do an update after GDC to talk about how it goes.  But at the rate we do things, we’ll forget, and the next update will be sometime around the year 2057.

Peace out!

Hey All!

Just wanted to say "Hi".  Also, we are demoing Shadow Fencer Theatre this week at GDC, so come visit us at the Intel booth in the expo hall Thursday from 10am-2pm!

Woo!

Hey Everyone.  So we don't do devlogs very well.  Anyway, we are excited to announce that Shadow Fencer Theatre will be showcasing with Indie MEGABOOTH at PAX East 2019!  If you are there, stop on by and say Hi!

We also want to announce that the game is available to add to your Wishlist on Steam!
Wishlist Shadow Fencer Theatre Now! (https://store.steampowered.com/app/914420/Shadow_Fencer_Theatre/)

Check out our Website for trailers, screenshots and more info on all things Shadow Fencer Theatre
Shadow Fencer Theatre - Official Website (http://www.shadowfencertheatre.com)

Looks good! A tip: Post some screenshots in your first post, as that's what we all see right off the bat.

Thanks Xonatron! Working on screenshots now actually. Since we updated our website we lost the screenshots that were on here  :facepalm:

Hey Everyone! We are excited to announce that Shadow Fencer Theatre is Available Now on Xbox One and Steam!

Find Us on Steam! Shadow Fencer Theatre on Steam! (https://store.steampowered.com/app/914420/Shadow_Fencer_Theatre/)
Find Us on Xbox One! Shadow Fencer Theatre on Xbox One! (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/shadow-fencer-theater/9NNWK1DTB2G9?activetab=pivot:overviewtab)

Can't wait for you to play!

Hey there, since we've launched the game, we will be moving our devlog updates to our discord! There puppeteers can find out what's new and improved as updates are released.  Please come join us, check out the July Update post, and have a lotta fun!


Follow New DevLog Posts on our Discord! (https://discord.gg/U2JA3rh)