Making My First Game FUN TO PLAY in one week - Punch A Bunch Devlog

hello and welcome to another video in the series where i'm trying to create my own video game from scratch with zero experience i recently released a demo of the game i'm making that you guys played and it's pretty clear that the game has some issues no that's not fair oh come on no no a lot of you are struggling with the control center having a hard time understanding what's going on [Music] basically the game is frustrating to play and not very fun ouch so this week i'm gonna try to figure out what the problem is by comparing more successful games to my game and try to figure out what they did right and i did wrong and then i'll do my best to fix it wish me luck [Music] a lot has happened since i set out on this whole journey we've moved a few times i quit my job we became homeless for a while and disclaimer we weren't actually sleeping on the streets we were lucky enough to be able to stay with viv's parents more info in this video it's been a wild ride but viv and i are finally settling into our new home things are really really good ziggy is doing great i don't know if you saw the last video i'm just really really happy the game i'm making is a rkd physics based boxing game it's coming along really well most of like the basic stuff is all working now like you know punching moving around blocking we also have a fully running ai with customizable characteristics and difficulties so that i can really make a bunch of opponents for the game that feel unique and different and varying difficulty of course so for this game i've focused a lot on on the controls for the games you can basically with a stick you can lean your upper body you can move around and then you can perform punches with each hand and block it's a cool idea but the problem is that when you're playing the game there's just too much like okay so you're punching with these buttons and then you're moving around with this one and then you're locking leaning but moving and it's the controls are frustrating and it's just not that great another problem with the game is that it's not communicating clearly to the player what is actually happening in the game we think of games as a form of entertainment where the player pushes buttons and something in return happens on the screen but while the player is communicating with the game it's equally important for the game to communicate back to the player while i do have some sound effects and visual elements that appear when you hit your opponent etc i feel like we can do better in terms of clarifying what each of those things mean for example was that a successful hit did the enemy block like it's all there you know there's like sound effects like you know that was a hit that's a block but the problem is it's like it's not it's not clear enough to give you an example here is my game this is when you hit an enemy these little things pop up and we play a little sound effect pretty cool okay but now let's look at another game like um tekken [Music] notice how the entire frame is filled with explosion elements and other goodies you may also notice how the game uses color to communicate with a player when a successful attack is landed there's a burst of color and other stuff along with the juicy sound effect when you block however we see this bland white puff along with a very unsatisfying sound effect while this stuff looks really cool it's also the game telling the player aha your attack was not successful now going back to our boxing game i think what we need to do is to just make things a lot more obvious so that the player understands when they did something right versus something wrong so now that we've identified at least part of the problem i have two main objectives for this week first is to do something about these frustrating controls which has been on my to-do list for a long time too add more feedback into the game to make the gameplay more satisfying and responsive this will really help the player to get better at actually playing the game because if there's not a clear feedback it's just really hard to learn how to play the game because it's just not clear when you're doing something right and wrong i guess that's what i just said anyways you know what i mean hopefully by doing these two things we can save this game and not have to scrap it and since i've already procrastinated fixing the controls for months i figured what's another few days so i decided to focus on more fun stuff which is adding cool visuals to the game you know what they say always do the least fun thing last right i'm pretty sure that's how it goes alright let's get to work [Music] [Applause] but first we need to actually figure out what's important to communicate to the player for example in sakura the enemies can perform special attacks that you as the player are unable to block that's a pretty big deal and would be very frustrating if there was no way to tell which ones those are so the developers even went to the extent of adding a huge set of letters above your head to inform you that an unblockable attack is incoming currently in my game there's not much of a difference between a successful face punch or a body shot or even a block which not only makes it really confusing but it's also very unclear to the player what they should be focusing on to get better so what i've learned here is that while it's really important to draw attention to the things that matter in the game it's equally important to remove distractions from things that aren't important so i've narrowed it down to uh these three things blocking a face punch and a body punch it's super important that the player understands the difference between these three events they all need to look distinctly different from each other so that the player can really tell when something different is happening so i'm going to apply a trick i learned when i used to work in the movie industry which is rather than nudging things in the right direction in small baby steps simply crank it up to the very extreme where you have to start dialing it back to get a good result this is usually much faster and a more efficient way of dealing with things okay this is obviously way too much but check this out a bit too much but see now we can just bring it back down until it feels just right i actually have the privilege of doing most of this work during a live stream on twitch last week just an awesome time so i want to give a huge shout out and thank all of you who tuned in to the stream last week it was really incredible you know coming up with suggestions and just hanging out and a special thanks goes out to freakshie who went through the trouble of actually sending me audio clips which i even ended up putting in the game so naturally freak sheep welcome to the epic pegboard baby running out of clamps if you don't want to miss the next live stream head over to twitch and give me a follow at the links in the description we live stream fridays and sundays but i also do a little bit of off the cuff streams you know in between during the weekdays we do a variety of stuff on the live stream it's not just game day we tend to play some games we'll be playing dark souls and just watch videos and do other stuff as well so come and hang out while i was making pretty good progress on creating better visuals for the game i still had more pressing issues to deal with that i just simply could not put off any longer okay so last night i got an idea that i'm really excited to try out the problem with the controls right now is that there's just too much going on you move around with the joystick just very standard right but then you lean with this right one which is kind of unconventional so it takes a little bit of time to getting used to then combine that with the fact that you can punch with both hands and then block with each hand and it just becomes this mess where you like like my brain starts to hurt after a while and i never really get into that flow of feeling totally in control generally when there's a problem i find that just start by simplifying so the idea is rather than having to use you know your entire hand to play i want to see if i can make just a single punch button remember the whole point of the game is the whole leaning function that that is what makes the game unique it's basically how you decide which attack you do like you know for example if you lean from one side to the other that would be a hook back and straight it's a a straight punch so building on that i figured what if the way you're leaning determines which hand you use as a punch not only would this solution eliminate the frustration with using too many buttons at the same time but it would also reinforce the fact that the leaning is really an integral part of the game i fully expected to spend several days if not the whole week trying to create this controller solution but to my surprise after just an evening of work i actually had something up and running that felt pretty good oh oh dude this works this is like perfect what after playing for about 20 minutes or so and feeling already 200 more confident playing the game i'm gonna go ahead and say that these controls are now the new main controls i'm not gonna bother explaining too much what they feel like rather i'm gonna be uploading the game to my itch page where you can give it a shot yourself and then you can let me know how you feel about it i would really appreciate your feedback on this i feel really really happy about this i feel like this finally turned the game into a real game going from what we had before unless for some reason you guys completely disagree and think it's horrible i'm gonna call this a job done in case you do prefer the old control scheme i will leave an option in the menu to completely revert back to what we had before the visual improvements for the game were also coming along really well after a long 11 hour live stream we had some pretty great advancements i made the shock wave when you land a face punch much stronger and added some more particles something i haven't really talked much about is the difference between a face punch and a body punch but i'll give you the short version a face punch will deal primarily just damage to your opponent but a body punch will deal some damage but primarily drain the opponent's stamina making it an effective strategy to tire your opponent out so to highlight this i change the color so that when you land a body punch the particles are primarily blue to indicate the loss of stamina rather than health when you block an attack these puffy white particles show up and during the stream we landed on a sound effect like this one i'm still not sure about the block i do feel like it needs something more distinct to really separate it from a successful punch i did talk about an idea of adding some sort of force field during the stream which you all hated but i had a really good feeling about my force field idea so i went ahead the next day anyways and tried it so what do you think about this so like okay what do you think about this blocking thing so every every time the enemy blocks your attack it's like you get this little little shield that shows up i know it's not realistic or anything like it's not like there's an actual like an actual force field but it's like it's just supposed to give you like a clear indication that the enemy blocked your strike right yeah yeah that's super clear like is it distracting no no not at all because it like comes on and fades off right away and that's what i figured also it looks like it has like some transparency or something yeah that's awesome i like it i think that's great good feedback i personally really like the shield i think it makes it very clear that the opponent blocked and really helps communicate what's going on and i also think it looks pretty nice but please do tell me what you think about it in the comments should we keep it or should we scrap it another little detail for all you nerds out there that have come up in the comments quite a few times is how i'm handling hit detection for the game yes science hats on for this part i've been too embarrassed to admit this but i've been using the regular physics system to detect when a glove hits the head basically when the glove touches the head a collision is detected and that's how i tell the game that a successful punch happened this might not seem bad and it isn't on a really fast computer but if you play the game on a slower computer with a lower frame rate you can run into a problem where the glove moves so much from one frame to the next that it essentially teleports straight through the head and the collision is never detected i mean i don't know who would want to play the game like this but that's besides the point you can sort of see these dots and that gives you an idea of when the detection is happening and kind of helps illustrate the problem the built-in system also has some pretty bad limitations so instead i'm now sending a ray trace in between all these points every frame so that if the hand did pass through the head the ray trace would catch it and we would still fire off a successful punch this also gives me a lot more control in dealing with different things so it was definitely a worthy upgrade if you want to try playing punch a bunch you can download it on my itch page i just uploaded a fresh new version with the new controls and everything updated so please have a go and let me know what you think it's totally free i should warn you though the new control scheme not very great with keyboard and mouse it's alright but i it's just much better to play with a controller to tell you the truth but if you don't have a controller you can't play with your keyboard and mouse we have a great discord community so hop in there and have some fun links in the description if you like live streams don't forget to follow my twitch channel where i live stream every friday and every sunday religiously that's it for me for this weekend oh don't forget about that google algorithm juice please give the video a thumbs up if you liked it subscribe if you haven't already thanks for watching

Channel: Pontypants

Views: 3,217

Keywords: Unreal Engine 4, Unity, gamedev, devlog, game devlog, boxing game, good boxing game, making a 3d game, making a game, how to make games, game design, creating a game, making an indie game, indie game, dani, sam hogan, jonas tyroller, mythic legion, randall, randy, brackeys, gamedev journey, making my first game, dev blog, ponte pants, pontepants, pontypants, devblog, punch a bunch, punch a bunch devlog, muck, crab game, making a game fun

Id: iHIpXC6Y2yQ

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021