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[SaNoBen]

Battery Jam is a local multiplayer party game being developed by our studio, Halseo. In Battery Jam you and up to three friends fight to conquer an arena that is constantly being changed by each player. You can create deadly pits of lava, instant barriers, play ping pong with explosives and generally wreak havoc on your opponents' efforts while capturing as much of the arena as possible.

Most Recent Post:

One of the big projects I've been tackling is getting bots into our game so that people who might not have three friends and four controllers on hand can still play. So far their behavior is pretty random. They'll collect tiles and punch things but there's not much strategy to it, and as you can see they don't have a great sense of self preservation.

One of the challenges with getting AI into our game is the dynamic arena. Our bots need to treat walls and pits as potentially navigable terrain so they don't get easily boxed in.

We've got a lot more to show you as we work, so keep an eye open!  We're looking to get as much community feedback as possible about the game in general and on each update as it comes out. Please leave a comment and feel free to message any of us!

Abraham - SaNoBen
Brandon - Brandon Swan

https://www.facebook.com/batteryjam/
[email protected]

[s_harriton]

This looks wonderful!

[SaNoBen]

We've been working on fine tuning our new tile capturing design.

First up we have a change to our dash mechanic. We set up our dash to chain up to four times, letting the player choose a new direction for each dash.

We also added an explosive box that could wipe out large chunks of tiles at once. Players can knock the box around in cardinal directions by using their projectile attack.

The box presents a danger that players have the ability to respond to and interact with directly.

[SaNoBen]

We just got back from a brief hurrication (hurricane + vacation), we're looking forward to getting back into development, but first here's some stuff we were working on before Irma so rudely interrupted us.

We've added several layout variants on top of our original 9x14 tile map.

We also added a teleporter. It can move the player or a Boom Box from point A to point B instantaneously. Also: Speedy thing go in, speedy thing come out.

[SaNoBen]

We needed a way to deal with ties. So we sat down and came up with something pretty straightforward.

All non-winners are forcibly ejected from the match. The stage drops into lava and players are given twenty seconds to kill the other remaining players.

We've also updated the boombox with a "capture box" variant. When the capture box "detonates" it levels out all tiles in the blast and captures those tiles. Now every box will spawn as a boom box, but a player can change a boom box into a capture box by crushing another player.

[SaNoBen]

We've been working to find out what the limits of our dynamic arena are. From our initial four layout variants we've ballooned up to around twenty five.



Given how central the boom box is to the game now, a lot of what makes a map successful for our game is how well the boom box interacts with it.

[Brandon Swan]

Hey everyone, Brandon Swan here, Creative Director on Battery Jam!
We've been real busy over here and I wanted to show off something we did recently, and get some feedback from anyone willing!


So we have characters right? Four of em, and we got pretty positive responses to them, people seem to think they're cute.
They look(ed) like this.


We're sprucing them up, and recently got the first on in game! Meet the new Turbo!



We feel good about him minus some small tweaks, but what do you all think?

Here's where I need some input in particular.

Long story short, we're using red in other places so Rocket can't be red.

Here's some of my early ideation on him. If you guys have any thoughts or ideas, I'd love some input! He's got us all a bit stumped at the moment.


Any ideas or thoughts on what's working and what might not be?

[luxregina]

I have a slight preference for #2 - I like the touch of accent color. However, it would be interesting to check if this added color adds clutter when the character is smaller on your game screen.

[Brandon Swan]

I have a slight preference for #2 - I like the touch of accent color. However, it would be interesting to check if this added color adds clutter when the character is smaller on your game screen.

So far, we eally only anticipate showing the characters either very close up or far away, so we're trying to make sure they're looking good at both depths. That said, we have some details we're messing with, patterns kind of like that in particular, that we're trying to pin down how we handle.

Because you're exactly right, in game where it's far away, it's not always helping!

[Brandon Swan]

We recently had to make a decision on whether or not we were going to keep the musical elements we originally designed into the characters.
Which means we had some revisions to do!
Largely on Turbo, cause he had that big ass trumpet on his head.
Here's some of the ideation and the final shapes we went with, along with our revised logo!


We also wrapped up the redesign on Rocket, which we revisited pretty thoroughly.
Here's a little lineup of what the chars are looking like, minus Turbo's head edit. We'll have low poly's to post here soon of the entire crew, which we're excited to show!

[SaNoBen]

One of the big projects I've been tackling is getting bots into our game so that people who might not have three friends and four controllers on hand can still play. So far their behavior is pretty random. They'll collect tiles and punch things but there's not much strategy to it, and as you can see they don't have a great sense of self preservation.

One of the challenges with getting AI into our game is the dynamic arena. Our bots need to treat walls and pits as potentially navigable terrain so they don't get easily boxed in.