FLOCK FIGHTERS

ABOUT

A 4 player Pikmin-style battle royale, but with chickens, and trust issues, made for the 2018 WolverineSoft Turkey Game Jam. Play as a sociopathic chicken that raises and sells their own chicks for money! Go head to head with other players by clucking at them and making them lose their chicks. The bigger your chicks grow, the more you can sell them for.

DEVELOPMENT INFO

  • Developed by Seyhyun Yang, Jason Debel, Loren Heubert-Aubry, Daniel Thomas, and finalbossblues
  • 48 hour development cycle (November 2018)
  • 5 developers
  • Made using Unity Engine

CONTRIBUTIONS

  • Programmer
  • Designer

POST-MORTEM

WHAT WENT RIGHT

  • The 2.5D graphical style was implemented very quickly after only an hour or two of prototyping, and was achieved using 2D sprites against a 3D background instead of a Panel
  • The core gameplay loop was decided fairly early in the development cycle, and was prototyped and tested fast enough that a significant amount of time was able to be used for playtesting and balancing the game





WHAT COULD BE IMPROVED

  • There was a very hard pivot 18 hours into the Game Jam, and while the game was completed quickly, we had to work overnight to ensure it was finished
  • It is still possible to softlock yourself by pushing yourself between the trucks and the fence and getting stuck, and there are several other bugs that we were unable to fix because most of the time left was spent on polishing the visuals and balancing the gameplay



LESSONS LEARNED

  • More time should be spent in pre-production to concretely decide on the design and mechanics of the game so pivots are not neccessary and the game can be finished within a reasonable time period
  • Although polish and juice are very important, playtesting and fixing bugs should also be focused on to ensure a more complete game experience

CONTRIBUTIONS

My major contribution to this project was the implementation of the menu system and the egg spawner, and the design of the game mechanics. As stated earlier, the original idea for the game was completely different, being a game a where you play as an egg, rolling down a hill and avoiding obstacles and trying not to crack yoursel open. Around 18 hours were spent on this, and then we decide to pivot to the current idea. The mechanics for the eggs spawing went through multiple iterations throughout the design process. Originally, they were supposed to simply spawn randomly, and then it was changed so that random nests would spawn with eggs in them, and then fixed nests with randomly spawing eggs, and the final iteration was fixed nests with eggs spawning after a set time passes after the egg is hatched and the chick is taken. These changes were mostly due to having not enough time to implement the mechanics, and the playing field of the game being decided to be small enough that random spawns were ineffective in making the game more fun to play.