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[Tiblanc]

Pixel Brawlers

Pixel Brawlers is a game about pixel entities duking it out for no particular reason. As a manager of pixel entities, it's your responsibility to channel their desire to bash heads into organised matches where you can show your stuff against other managers. Groups of 3 are formed and pitted against each other until one side in completely annihilated. A game should last less than 5 minutes, making it the perfect distraction throughout the day.

The game follows a turn based approach and is strongly inspired by a classic : Rock-Paper-Scissors. Every turn, you can choose one of 3 stances or swap in a unit from the back row. The winner of the turn gets to attack the enemy unit. In case of a draw, the stalemate meter is increased which fuels more rage for the next turn's winner. In the rare case where there's a draw 4 turns in a row, the game switches to [unnamed mode] where you get to pick 3 stances per turn. Winning 2 out of 3 will deliver a powerful attack. Winning all 3 will do a major combo with all units that will seriously cripple the other guys.

To spice things up, units can have active and passive skills. Active skills are activated when the team's combo meter is filled up. It fills up when you successfully attack of evade attacks and is depleted when you get punched in the face. Active skills can either replace the default attack or provide other benefits like healing your guys or messing around with the enemy team's buffs. Passive skills can activate under certain conditions and do not depend on a meter. They are weaker than active skills, but can synergise and make your team much stronger. Both types of skills can activate in specific stances to make units favor a particular stance.

Some examples of active skills would be :
- Warrior deals a powerful blow in the Power stance
- Paladin heals all allies after his attack in the Balance and Flow stances
- Mage throws lightning bolts at all enemies in the Flow stance

Some examples of passive skills would be :
- Rogue deals damage when evading an enemy attack in the Flow stance
- Corrosive Slime saps 1 attack buff whenever attacked
- Chef heals front unit whenever they successfully attack when Chef is in the back row
- Vampire provides lifesteal to front unit in the Power stance

To top it off, units also provide temporary team buffs when they win a stance. These buffs are defined by the stance and apply to the entire team. For example, the Warrior will give +1 Attack in Power and Flow stance and +1 Defense in the Balance stance.  They serve as a snowball effect. If you win a few turns in a row, you will have a big stat advantage allowing you to quickly finish off your opponent. However, if you lose a turn, you will randomly lose part of your buffs. Some units specialize in this area by giving more buffs. This opens up strategies where you use a weaker unit to build up your buffs, then swap in a powerful unit and squash the other guy like a bug.

While the battle system is simple to learn, it allows for lots of unit possibilities by altering skills and stats. The plan is to have at least 50 different units when the game is launched and add lots more later on. This should provide lots of unit synergies for players to discover and a meta game to evolve.

Outside battle features are also planned. This will allow players to recruit new units, send them off in missions to gather riches or duke it out in great tournaments. The specifics are still up in the air for now.

I'm currently using DawnLike sprite sheets as placeholder. The plan is to replace them eventually, but I may also stick with it and use Unity's animation features to breath some life into characters.

Latest screenshots


The warrior wants to smack the mage, but he will have none of it


Go Go Power Rangers!


Ninjas flip out and kill people ALL THE TIME!

Progress report

The web server basics are done. This includes database, combat flow and AI. A lot of features still need to be added, but a battle is playable.

The Unity client has been started. Networking with the web server is functional. Basic animations are in.

Next steps :
- Integrate networking with battle playback
- Build a rough UI to interface with the battle server

Team

Programming
- David Labbé (me)

Art
- Open
- Placeholder art by DragonDePlatino : http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=38615.0
- Placeholder art by 7Soul1 : http://7soul1.deviantart.com/art/420-Pixel-Art-Icons-for-RPG-129892453

Music and Sound Effects
- Open

Game Design
- David Labbé (me)
- Open

[Tiblanc]

Last week I worked on a basic event sequencing architecture. This will allow generic server events to be converted into client animations with proper sequencing based on what unit is in play with as little mess as possible. I also built a client database in Unity that allows me to assign sprites and animations to a given unit from the server by using Unity's drag and drop editor. The result of these 2 features is summarized in this gif where I setup the units on each team based on what the server returned and then play their spawn animation in sequence.



Why walk when you can flip?

Next week I plan to continue converting server events into client feedback and start working on a basic UI to send turn commands.

[GregBTGS]

Looks good, ill be keeping an eye on this.
Don't forget that rock-paper-scissors is an easy game to win, when you know how.
Don't try and create a perfectly balanced game cause it wont work, more info:




Aside from that the animations and sprites look great.

[Tiblanc]

Thanks for your interest!

I'm not going for perfect balance since that would require too much work. The game is designed so each character slightly favors one stance over the others by having abilities activate in a given stance. This should create the imbalance situation the video you linked describes. I'm expecting advanced players to figure out game breaking unit combos similar to CCGs and let a meta game evolve from there.

As for the sprites, they're not mine unfortunately. They're DragonDePlatino's : http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=38615.0  I'm using them as placeholder for now and covering the fact there are only 2 frames per sprite by abusing Unity's animation feature. I may replace them if someone tags along to do some fresh ones or if there's enough interest in the game that hiring an artist near release makes sense.

[Tiblanc]

I didn't quite achieve the goal of starting working on UI, but figured I could update this thread since almost 2 weeks passed and I need to keep myself in check.

Server events are now converted to replicate server status in the client. Right now, only the attack has visual feedback. The rest simply updates game objects' values. The hooks are in place to add some explosions later on though. There's not much to show, so no fancy gif this week!

I also started designing units by writing down their role, stats and skills in a spreadsheet to get an idea of what I may need to implement down the road. Target is to design 50 units so I can trim it down to 25. I'm trying to create units that play out differently rather than creating similar units with slightly different stats. It's a challenge, but so far it's progressing nicely with 16 units designed and more coming out as I figure out synergies and counters to existing units. Balance feels out of whack, but that's alright since I'm just looking for gameplay mechanics at this point.

Next week I'll start working on UI so I can send turn commands to the server and play an actual game against the AI.

[and]

Love them little ninja flips

[Tiblanc]

I started working on the UI and made the game playable to some degree. I this update, I created the 5 buttons you'll ever use during a battle: stance selection and swap unit. There's also an image that keeps track of the current stance of each team with some popping animations to keep things interesting. I used 7Soul1 icons as placeholder : http://7soul1.deviantart.com/art/420-Pixel-Art-Icons-for-RPG-129892453



In this case, I decide to swap in my Ninja since they wield real ultimate power. Silly AI switches to balance stance which my Ninja laughs at. Then AI figures out Ninjas flip out and kill people ALL THE TIME, so he brings his, but little did he know he can't swap in a unit and change stance, so my Ninja shows him who's boss. After that, it seems he understood my trickery of always picking the power stance and he decides to be cheap and pick the flow stance. I will not fall for that, so I declare the game over with me as a clear winner.

I also continued designing some more units, bringing the total to 35. Surprisingly, I managed to create them with different enough skill set that they don't feel like a reskin of each other. There are still some battle features I can exploit to create more units, so I should be able to bring that count to 50 at some point in the future and then trim it down to the first 25 to be implemented. I'll start showing them up when I implement their skills.

Coming up next is more UI stuff and bug fixes like that blinking issue when units swap in.

[Tiblanc]

I almost put the core combat UI together to expose functionality. I'm still missing a few pieces like the active buff/debuff display and stance related buffs, but I'm putting them off for now because I'm redesigning some parts of the battle system. When I started this game, I put a constraint where all game relevant stats should fit on the fingers of 2 hands. I ended up in situations where some stats were getting out of range and this also had the potential of breaking the game. So I reinforced some constraint and that means refactoring a bit of code..



So here's everything that can be used to trigger game events which I use to design skills and make each class play differently.

The big number in the top corners is Momentum. This is a value that is meant to increase damage as the game drags on. It goes up by 1 when you win a turn and goes down by 1 when you lose 2 turns in a row. Overall, this values tends to go up except if you suffer a big lose streak at which point it plummets. Carry type classes use this value in their skills in some manner. For example, dealing more damage based on the momentum value or giving your team 1 buff per momentum point.

The green bar is the stalemate meter. Whenever there's a draw, this goes up by 1. Its purpose is to increase the worth of winning a turn after a few draws. When it fills up to 3, some external entity (judge, crowd, sky wizard, etc) comes along and messes with the battle in some way by giving buffs/debuffs or doing something else. Some units also rely on this meter to trigger their skills. If you swap in the Gladiator when this meter is 2 or 3, he gets an extra attack before the turn is resolved.

The orange bar is the skill meter. This goes up when you win a turn (more if you hit) or if you evade a hit. 3 hits will fill this up. When it gets filled, your units can trigger their active skills. Active skills are more powerful than passive skills and usually require you to win a turn. Some other skills like the Gladiator is triggered by swapping in. You do not choose when to activate the skill. This helps maintain a rapid pace to the game.

The hearts is where unit HP is displayed. One of the goal of this combat system was to remove all numbers from the battle to make it visually easy to figure out where you stand in a fight. This is why I display HP in Zelda like fashion. Units can have more than 5 hearts at which point they get replaced by gold hearts, creating another layer on top of them. I'm missing a few things in there like the unit name, portrait and turns left before you can swap the unit in, but since it's placeholder art, I didn't bother putting them in yet.

Also, I feel like I'm at a point where I can integrate new people into the team. I had been putting this off until I had all elements in place to make it easier to work in parallel. If you have interest in the project and can contribute to the visual aspect of the game in any way, then feel free to contact me and we can work this out. I expect this game to remain low budget in terms or art, so a few frames per unit(if any) and lots of reuse for miscellaneous stuff. Pixel art is highly preferred since it's in the game's title I work on this during my daily bus commute so I do not expect more than a few hours per week, but I do expect continuous contribution.

[internationalfish]

I love the way the UI flows! However, reading your commentary after watching the animations, I have to say the stalemate and skill meters seem way too easy to mistake for HP/MP bars. That's probably not terribly useful input considering the early stage of the UI, but it was the first thing that grabbed my attention, aside from not being quite sure who was the active player before I realized they were swapping places so (I assume) the characters in the middle are the ones fighting.

[Tiblanc]

You're right about the stalemate and skill meter bars being confusing. These were placed there to be related to the active stance, but that may not be the best place. Adding some UI cues might solve it.

The whole "front unit only attacks" also seems to be a recurring confusing point. It's a strange concept when related to traditional RPGs, so I'll have to make it more obvious.

Thanks for the feedback!