HOOKMAN

We are making a four-player team deathmatch game.

Hook the enemies to your side and eliminate them to collect diamonds.

Iteration:

Basically, our game consists of the parts below:

Hook: the feedback said our previous hook mechanics didn’t make physical sense (the first hook is much slower than the second hook). So we decreased this speed difference and increased the speed of the hook. And players now cannot cancel the hook so they cannot drag the opposites into the river to score. What’s more, now when being hooked, the player would reduce health. 

Punch: We change the size of the punch to make it more suitable for the character. Also, the collecting power process becomes smoother. Also, we add some juicy parts to the collecting power procedure with some yellow particles showing on the fist.

Sound: We add many audios in the game.

Health bar: We change our original health bar by finding an awesome image for that. In addition, we change parenting to the following. So, the health bar showing now is only visible by the player itself. Players can figure out others' health by noticing their body colour. The lower HP they have, the brighter body they have. 

Guidance: We fixed the tutorial bugs that appeared last time and added 1,2,3,4 keys to skip the tutorial if the soft lock happens again.

Blog:

(What’s New?) A list of what has changed this week (tweaked mechanics, added content, etc).

• Redesign the mechanics of the hook. We changed the speed of the hook to make it more playable, also, we changed the saving and collaborating attack system.
• Hooking enemies now can cause damage to the enemy (5 health points per second)
• Player can no longer cancel the hook. So that the player won’t easily die by falling into the water, emphasizing the use of punching.
• Redesign the health bar showing. HP showing also depends on the color of the body it showed.
• Add the feature: assume that there are Player P1 (red), P2(red), P3(blue), if P3 hook P2 and P1 hook P2 to save P2, then both of the two hooks will be cancelled.
• Add the feature: assume that there are Player P1 (red), P2(red), P3(blue), if P1 hook P3 and in the hooking process, P2 hook P3, then the first hook will be canceled and P3 will be hooked by P2 instead.

(What’s the Motivation?) A discussion / summary of why you made these changes. Where is your project headed?

We made changes based on feedback from our peers and instructor’s playtestings, and redesigned the mechanics of the hook to make it more intuitive (make physical sense). 

Since somebody said that the health bar is not clear when changing the camera of the player, we change the parenting to following. Also changed the HP system also shown by the color of our players’ body.

To emphasize the importance of the hook, we add the damage to the hook if the player is hooking an enemy, it will cause damage during the process of being hooked.

Also, we still want to make it a multiplayer game rather than change this to a single-player game.

(What’s Next?) What changes you plan to make for the next iteration.

• Since saving teammates is relatively harder than hooking other players. We would add some buffs to the player who successfully saves his/her teammates.
• Maybe we could add some drop items after the player is killed. These items may act as scores or some buffs to further emphasize the use of the punch.
• More collaboration mechanics design and bug fixes. 

April 6 update:

(What’s New?) A list of what has changed this week (tweaked mechanics, added content, etc).

• Integrated mouse control into our game, but the current version isn’t good. We have to implement mouse relative position ourselves. We have contacted the Parsec SDK team to search for some help. They said they would probably add this feature in one or two weeks. 
• Remove friendly fire.
• Add respawn invincibility.  
• Change the audio to the audio we get from freelancers.
• Add more combat features. 
• Players can now uppercut when the enemy is dizzy. (hold punch key for about 1-3 seconds)
• Players can stop the enemy from pulling the hook and do a big hit on the enemy to the opposite direction. (hold punch key for about more than 3 seconds)
• To prevent players from holding the punch key all the time. When they hold the key for more than 5 five seconds, they got a penalty. 
• Better looking scoreboard. 
• The game no longer uses a countdown timer to decide win/lose. Instead, the first team getting 10 points wins the game.
• Player now drops a diamond when they get killed by the enemy, which is more related to our theme, two groups of pirates tried to get each other’s treasure. 
• Change the weapon showing text to the sprite they hold in hand. Player now holds a hook/shield in hand to indicate the item that they can use.
• Add an end scene to make the result of the game more obvious, and more juicy.

(What’s the Motivation?) A discussion / summary of why you made these changes. Where is your project headed?

We made changes based on feedback from our peers and instructor’s playtestings, and redesigned our combat mechanics. Instead of just punching each other, we add uppercutting. We think this is fun and it requires some skills to do a combo. 

We are also trying to make our game look more professional and juicy. Knowing the feedback that our game can be juicier, we improve the particle system of collecting power when punching, adding pirate hats for the players, and we added an ending scene to make our game more related to the theme and juicier. We also removed friendly fire to let our game be more intuitive and added quality audio to make the gameplay more intense.

(What’s Next?) What changes you plan to make for the next iteration. 

• Making short marketing videos to introduce our game to other potential players.
• Figure out a method to make the audio have better quality?
• If possible, we plan to make our end scene and the score system fancier to match the audio provided by freelancers
• We heard some feedback saying that we can add a bridge in the river so that players can get across to fight. We don’t know if this is possible and fun. Maybe we can have a try. 

April 11 update:

(What’s New?) A list of what has changed this week (tweaked mechanics, added content, etc).

• Major tutorial update. Add a lot of content and the tutorial now is more comprehensive.
• Make the dizzy indication ring on head more obvious.
• Add some indication of the uppercut and the big hit to make the punching more obvious.
• Add punch spinning animation to make the punching juicier
• Change the audio back to a high quality version.
• Add the hit effect to make the punching juicier.
• Change the gravity and the dizzying time to make infinite combo impossible.
• Story scene edge fix.
• Add back the punch push back effect.

(What’s the Motivation?) A discussion / summary of why you made these changes. Where is your project headed?

As the instructor said, our damage indication is kind of vague. So, we add some warning when there are some uppercuts and big hits. Also, the grading team figured out that the game can be much juicer. So, our team adds some effect when somebody is getting punched and an animation when charging the punch.

There are five different abilities (punch, hook, uppercut, big-hit, shield) but we do not think the players know how to use them all, so we made our tutorial more comprehensive.

The player feedback told us that some people thought the shield was somewhat useless. But we think the main problem is not the mechanism itself but the lack of tutorials that clearly explain the mechanism of the shield.

There is some feedback that is impossible to be fixed at the moment due to poor Parsec features, including mouse control, cursor lock, and hiding cursor.

(What’s Next?) What changes you plan to make for the next iteration. 

• Improve our marketing video and try to make it funnier.
• Reconsider the mechanism of the shield based on the feedback provided this week.
• Find more places that we can make this game juicier.
• Have more conversation with the parsec trying to improve the mouse controlling.
• Make the canvas in the tutorial juicier.

April 19 update:

(What’s New?) A list of what has changed this week (tweaked mechanics, added content, etc).

• We tried to fix the audio. Now, clients can hear smooth audio. 
• Tutorial bugs fixed.
• Change the mechanic of the shield, also reduce the shifting time. Now the shield is much more useful and fun. Players can use it to prevent other players from getting the diamonds. 
• Add a CD for the hook to add difficulty of the infinite uppercut combo.
• Fixed mouse movement.
• Parsec added GameID, the game runs much smoother now.
• Fixed parsec-related technique problems
• Change the color of the particle system in the end scene.
• Add scene transition and beautify the end-scene.
• Add aim assist but we decided to turn it off due to the game balance.

(What’s the Motivation?) A discussion / summary of why you made these changes. Where is your project headed?

According to the feedback from the instructor, we try to improve our technical aspect. We try to make the game and the audio smoother for both host and clients. 

In addition, the instructor has mentioned mouse controlling. So we tuned the mouse sensitivity. 

Also, we tested 20 times as our instructor said and found that a pro player could combo the enemy infinitely. So, we decided to make it more difficult for players to combo infinitely, which would be much more friendly to new players.

(What’s Next?) What changes you plan to make for the next iteration. 

• Try to publish our game on Steam.
• Remove Parsec from our game and use Photon. Let players use joysticks to play. 

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To host the game:

Note:  The game can only be hosted on a Windows machine.

1. Download the zip file and unzip

2. Launch HookMan.exe

3. Click "Request Code".

4. Open the generated URL in a browser.

5. Copy the generated User Code and paste it to the text box that says "Enter your one-time code" on the web page.

6. Hit "Continue", then "Approve".

7. Return to the game and click "Start Parsec", and share the new URL to other players.

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To join the game:

After you receive the URL from the host, open it in a browser to join the game.

Note: To get the best gaming experience, please download the Parsec application.