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[mochakingup]

Paw Paw Paw is a 2D Sidescroller Beat 'Em Up about animals who refuse to wear pants.



https://store.steampowered.com/app/1037910/Paw_Paw_Paw/

Story

Paw Paw Paw was a peaceful and prosperous kingdom. Until one day, when the King had decided to enforce everyone to wear pants. Naturally, it didn’t sit well with the people. It’s wrong. It’s unnatural. No animals should wear any pants.

Those of us who refuse the pants banded together under one banner.

WE ARE THE RESISTANCE. WE ARE THE ANTIPANTS.

Game

At its core, Paw Paw Paw is a 2D Sidescroller Beat ‘Em Up game.

You play as part of the resistance in their effort to bring down the King. You can choose from four starting characters, with more characters to unlock later.

The game is pretty straightforward, you go from left to right defeating enemies and completing objectives. You can play it co-op up to 4 players locally, or you can hire a companion to be your sidekick. Collect foods to buy items to help you on your journey.  Level up your character, become stronger and unlock new moves. You can loot weapons from your enemies, and ride your majestic mount into battle!

Demo

The game is currently in development and planned for PC.
You can try your hand on the public demo here:

https://simpleton.itch.io/pawpawpaw

Let us know what you think!


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original first post:


Hello

Hi everyone,
been a long time lurker here, I'm a part of two man developer team, currently we're working on a 2D sidescroller beat em up game. So I thought I'd share and document the progress here, for learning and motivational purpose (now that it's out here we have to at least finish it, right?) :D

Not much to show at the moment, but we have the character controller and combo system working. My programmer have made the custom input sytem, it should support controller and keyboard. I've also made a basic template rig for the characters. here's a little bit of it in action:



ignore the bear-rat-rabbit hybird :p

The Plans

So the plan is to make about 25 levels with 5 bosses, 4 characters available on the start with more as unlockable.
we have some ideas for different objectives on some level to break up the pace, more on that later.

Each characters can only use certain type of weapon, our plan is to have 5 type of weapons (normal, light, heavy, shield, and bow).

Combos and stats can be upgraded from some kind of skill tree, we're thinking to cap the characters level to 25.

The characters will have the ability to do primary attack, secondary attack, block, roll, jump, and use skills.

Here's a preview of two characters that will be available from the start:



there's a backstory, but basically you play as new recruit of rebel/resistance and we're off to take the mad king down. will share more on the story once we flesh it out.

What To Do

Obviously, there's still a lot to do. Still a long way to go.
We also need to iron out the level progression relating to the story so it at least make sense.
Weapon system is currently in progress.
And I need to figure out the best way to make the level. Was thinking to tile a basic ground image, and then throw some environment props and stuffs on top of it. But we'll see how it goes.

So that's all we have for now,
I'll try to update this at least once a week.

Cheers! :D

[Ebinkatsu]

Hi there, I’m the programmer of this game. I started coding this game last year. This game was developed for mobile platform at the beginning, but for some reasons we decided to develop it for desktop.

Base Stats/Attributes

Each characters in Paw Paw Paw will have different build regarding their job. Here are the base stats/attributes presented in this game:

Strength. Greater strength deals greater damage.
Defense. Defense increases maximum value of character’s Health Points.
Stamina. Stamina increases maximum value of character’s Energy (something that works like Mana).
Agility. Agility affects how fast a character can move.
Critical Chance. Increases the chance to perform critical hit

Weapon System

We’ve been working on Weapon System last week. In Paw Paw Paw, each characters can only use certain type of weapons. Each weapons have their own buffs and perks.

Here’s a preview of a bear with various normal weapons and shields:

[mochakingup]

Hi everyone,

I've been mostly drawing grass and blood for the past week,
The first level will be an obligatory forest level

I was experimenting with style and decided to go with this one:



also testing out foliage light cookies, fake lighting, and LUT.

in the process I also came up with this grass, I kinda like it but it doesn't really fit for the forest theme
it feels more like a grass field, will keep it for another level in the future.



(too much bloom?)

moving on from the grass, I've made two characters for the starting roster, a ranger and an archer.
they're not animated yet, need to figure out what kind of combo moves they will have.



any comments and crits are welcome!

[flipswitchx]

Those are some angry little teddies! Nice logo and shield/sword animations. And lighting And name. Hm. Maybe needs more paw though. Pawpaw: Pawpaw pawpaw 

[migs]

I'm really the minimal art style! Plus that last guy (the archer) looks like an Ewok in a really great way

[mochakingup]

Those are some angry little teddies! Nice logo and shield/sword animations. And lighting And name. Hm. Maybe needs more paw though. Pawpaw: Pawpaw pawpaw 

Thanks! hahaha that name is too epic we'll never live up to it, maybe I should change it to Angry Bear instead?

I'm really the minimal art style! Plus that last guy (the archer) looks like an Ewok in a really great way

Thanks! I went with this flat style for the character because it's fast to make and it's easier to animate. And yeah, I guess it's because of the color scheme and the bushy beard.

[ashtonmorris]

Looks fun. The flat style is nice too.

[mochakingup]

Looks fun. The flat style is nice too.

Thanks, Ashton!

whoa, it's been a month since our last update. whelp, so much for updating once a week
so let's get to the update then!

X,Y, and Z

as said in previous post, this game was supposed to be a mobile game at first. But we've found it too limiting in term of controls. Of course we could always do some kind of virtual jostick and pad, but personally I hate virtual joystick. So we decided to scrap it and make it into a PC game instead.

We've already have a working system in 2D space, until we wanted the character to be able to jump. Calculating the jump and the order/depth manually in 2D proved to be too much of a hassle (we're lazy). So we went and used the extra dimension and rotate the camera and sprites at 45 degree, this way the characters can jump in Y axis while still being able to move around in X and Z axis.



and done! right? well, unfortunately it created a whole another issue. First issue was it's a pain to do the level design with all the rotation going on. It might not be so much of an issue if the ground is all flat from start to finish, but we wanted some elevation on the ground. We figured it'd be nice to make the level in plain 2D (just like before we decided to include Z axis), So we (by we, I mean Ebin, our script wizard) created a custom tool to automagically transforms that 2D scene into the required rotated versions with all the colliders set up.

here's a before after comparison of what the tool does:



(top one is the 2D, the blue overlay indicate the ground elevation shapes)

Light and LUT

We use fake 2D lighting to light the scenes in Paw Paw Paw.
How we did this is basically we used a bunch of sprites with additive material and render all the light objects in a separate camera, the resulting render will then be overlayed on top of the actual scene render. After that I add a Color Correction LUT image effect to further modify the look and feel of the scene.



The top left is the vanilla scene without any effects, and the rest are some different light and lut setup. man, I love messing around with this LUT stuffs!
In previous post I made a test for a foliage light cookies, while it looks ok for still image, once the character move around it looks fake and ugly af, so I settled with a simple round shaped light this time around.



and another test for fire particle and flickering light, sorry for the janky gif

Priority Shift

There will be a local Indie Game Festival coming in about a month from now and we are planning to go. We've been crunching to at least get a playable build to show on the event. That means new logo, functioning UI and menu, and a lot of tweaks and testing.

Speaking of new logo, what do you think of this one?



There are more progress but most of it is a trivial little things, or not yet implemented.
Obviously there's still a lot of things to do, but the game is starting to take shape, and we're really excited! 

As always, any comments and crits are welcome!
Thanks for reading!
Cheers!


PS. on unrelated note, I've just found out that there is a fruit called Paw Paw fruit!

[Bakuda]

Looks like a cute fun little game.  Yes, a game can be a beat em up game and still be cute, nothing wrong with that XD.  Anyway, it's looking great.  I love what you're doing with the lighting.  Good luck as you prep this game for the festival.  I hope you get everything done in time!

[Pixel Noise]

Love it. Love the name, the art style, everything

Logo looks good! It juxtaposes some of the "cute-ness" of the art, etc, with a bloodier look. Not sure if that's what you guys are going for - but that seems to be the way the game is trending, visually. Cute but also gory?

[mochakingup]

Looks like a cute fun little game.  Yes, a game can be a beat em up game and still be cute, nothing wrong with that XD.  Anyway, it's looking great.  I love what you're doing with the lighting.  Good luck as you prep this game for the festival.  I hope you get everything done in time!

Thanks for your kind words! we're still on track for the festival, the basic gameplay is almost done, at least for the warrior class. Struggling with the UI and menu though.

Love it. Love the name, the art style, everything

Logo looks good! It juxtaposes some of the "cute-ness" of the art, etc, with a bloodier look. Not sure if that's what you guys are going for - but that seems to be the way the game is trending, visually. Cute but also gory?

Thanks! It's not something that we consciously intended but I guess that's where we're going with this 
although I'm still not really sure with the logo, might change again in the future, but it'll have to do for now.

[shellbot]

Those lighting effects look dope!

What are you developing this in? Unity?

[Cranktrain]

Looks really fantastic, great art style! I too, would be very interested in how you're animating the characters, and how you're lighting them in-game.

[mochakingup]

Those lighting effects look dope!

What are you developing this in? Unity?

Hi, thanks Shellbot! yes, we are using Unity for this.

Looks really fantastic, great art style! I too, would be very interested in how you're animating the characters, and how you're lighting them in-game.

Thank you, Cranktrain!
For the character, I'm using Sprite and Bones. It's an open source 2D skeletal animation plugin for Unity. I mainly use it for the IK to make animating easier.

As for the light, We use fake 2d lighting which essentially is just sprites that placed on top everything else in the scene, including the character. This way the character will also affected by the light. We put these light sprites on separate layer to be rendered on different camera.



So on the first camera, I set it to render everything but the Light layer. Second camera is what the light sprites actually look like, the camera is set to render to texture. And then we blend the resulting texture on top of the first camera. The darker area will become shadow and vice versa. And on top of that we added LUT and subtle Bloom image effects.

I hope this make senses.

[mochakingup]

Hi again, everyone!
Here are some little updates on our progress.

Art Stuffs

First of all, we have a new artist! yay!!
Environment art isn't my strongest suit, so I've enlisted help from my friend, he'll be working on the environment arts from now on. Here's a little preview of the reworked forest environment assets



Hopefully this will sped up our overall progress, and also, I can focus my work on creating and animating characters.



new enemies, bounty hunters! The one on the right is a new class, Berserker, dual wielding regular weapons.

Blood

I've been tinkering with the blood particle again



Take that, you filthy rats!! (for some reason, I think this GIF is a bit faster than it actually was)

It was really hard for me to get it right, I was looking for an easy way to squish the particle a little bit along Y axis, so they can blend better with the ground and the overall point of view of the game, but no luck so far.

UI and Menu Mockups

moving on to the player UI. The UI has to be somewhat compact, since there can be up to 4 players playing. But it also needs to display important informations. This is where I'm strugling to find the middle ground. Here's what we have right now



Not sure where will I put the UI for some skills that have active duration or something like that. For buffs and debuffs we're thinking to show the effects directly on the characters and not using any icons. Another thing to note, on our test play, I noticed that the player UI feels like um, invisble? I don't know the right word. It feels like it need more feedback on the UI, like when the character get hurts or something.

Now here's a mockup on the menu for the demo,



Toying around with card concept for the character selection, kinda like it, what do you think?

[mochakingup]

A little update,
working on 2D parallax that also works on the Editor view, so I can position background and foreground objects correctly

[thekosmonaut]

The main menu is awesome af, I also really dig the character design

[mochakingup]

Thanks, thekosmonaut!

now another little update

Update on the event

it was a blast!

A lot of people tried our game and we got tons of feedbacks.
some feedbacks are things that we're completely unaware of, and some are old problems that we weren't really sure how to tackle yet.

Here are some of the most frequent feedbacks:

1. The pace is too slow
a lot of people thought that the action is too slow, and looking at it now, we agree. We're gonna tweak up the delay between attack animation and also the end of each attack animations so that the attack feel more responsive.

2. Confusion on the Z axis
this is an old problem that we encountered before. Basically, when characters moving up and down it's kinda difficult to line up the characters with the enemies, resulting a missed attack while visually it looks like it should hit. We minimized this by widening the collider on the z axis, on the demo we see this promblem occured mostly on elevated/uneven ground, where position can get really confusing. I think what we're gonna do is either reducing elevation variation on level, or set the combat/enemy spawn only on flat ground.

3. Enemy health bar
We don't show health bar for the enemies for various reasons, first and foremost it cluttered up the screens. But I see how health bar on enemies can be handy. Maybe we'll include it as an option? Something like always on, on hit, always off. Not sure.

4. UI is too small
Not something that the players explicitly said, but something that I noticed when they play it. Especially on the skills icon and the cost of the skill. Working on the UI redesign right now.

5. Health pickup
Something that we have planned but haven't implemented yet.

6. Co-op revive
Also planned, but not sure how to do it yet. The easiest way would be to hold a button to revive team mate. We like how Castle Crashers implement revive, but we don't want to simply copy it.


Weird bugs

We had a working build just before we get on the train, everything works as intended, except a couple of small unimportant bugs, where some enemy fell under the ground when they spawn, apparently they were spawned under some rocks and get pushed through the ground collider. We were like, 'naah don't worry about it, it should be easy to fix'. So after about 8 hours of travel, our programmer sat down and try to fix those bugs. Couple of minutes passed, it was fixed, after checking several times on the editor, we decided to hit the build button. This is where things get weird.

The screen is all black on the new build, except for the UI element. Confused, as we haven't touch anything render related, we tried to run our previously working build, and somehow it also broke. Like how is that even possible??
after a few hours of tinkering and finding where the bug originated (oh, this was the night before the event, btw), we found it to be related to the image effect that we used for fake light, but still we couldn't find the cure for this particular bug. As a final desperate solution we decided to run this script we found on Reddit which make the Unity Editor fullscreen when playing, since our game working just fine on editor. So yeah we were running unity editor on the event. :D

Once the event ended and we back on our hometown and have some rest, we've found the root of the problem. Rendertexture in unity is somewhat broken, on directx you need to turn antialiasing for it to work on build. So that's it. we just need to turn on antialiasing :/ But it still doesn't explain how it also broke the previous build, or how it was working on the first place..

so lesson to be learned if we are planning to go to another event, (which we are)
If you have a working build, leave it alone.
Bring two laptops. (not that it will solve our bugs, but still)

So I guess that's it, sorry, I have nothing fancy to show on this update
I'll try to record some gameplay on the build that we brought to the event, and hopefully post it here soon.

Thanks for reading,
Cheers!

[mochakingup]

Hi, everyone!
A lot have been changed since the last post, mostly are under the hood, like how the combo works, animation tweaks here and there, tweaking time between action, stuffs like that. some changes are the results from the early feedbacks that we got.

most of the gifs are really choppy, (I recorded it on 12fps, any good reccomendation for gif capture?)
but we managed to make the overall combat feels faster, more fluid, and responsive. One thing that we did is by removing the static/waiting frame at the end of each attack. and now attack speed is also affected by the character's agility stats.

Demon Possesed Tails

First thing first though, bugs!
So I updated to Unity 5.4 and this  happened.



something to do with the IK and negative scale on the characters, I believe.

Air Juggling

Next, a little bit of air juggling,
And also air attack in general.
This took some time to figure out, especially how to get the feel of the control right.
the first attack after jumping will send the enemies flying into the air, and then you can proceed to juggle the enemies



Stun and Burn

Some of the status effects in the game, stun and burn
Still not satisfied with how the fire looks. Will experiment a bit more on that.



this was recorded with a 100% burn chance on the weapon just to test things out. There will be special weapon with this kind of power, and there's also environmental hazard.

Head

..will roll!!
one of my personal favorite feature , decapitation is implemented!



enemies also drop loots, either foods or weapons. we have plan on how the foods will work, but we'll keep it for now.

Uphill Battle

previously, combat in elevated/angled floor is really confusing, you can't really tell where the characters are actually standing. As it turned out simply by rotating the shadow to match the angle of the ground, it easily conveys that the characters are actually standing on angled ground and reduced a lot of the confusion.



the next step would be to also rotate the blood decals, and fallen characters.

[mochakingup]

UI and menu is something weird for me, it almost feel like it's never done. so after some iterations this is what we have at the moment. and I don't know, it'll probably change again, but I'll leave it for now.





The idea was for each character to has their own UI color, and it carries over on the UI on battle, weapon selection, skill tree, etc. But after looking at this gif, it doesn't feel right. Too inconsistence, too flashy, or something.
I'll probably change it so the color assigned to specific player, like red for player 1, yellow for player 2 and so on.
What do you think?