Punch Punch!
Punch Punch! was made for a one-week, group alternate controller game jam in Unreal Engine 5.
The idea for the game was to get players moving in a mock boxing situation. Punch Punch! uses a Makey Makey kit to send input signals to Unreal Engine in order to allow the player to control the game by punching and stepping.
On the team I focused on the gameplay and controller design as well as working with our team's main programmer to implement our alternate controller.
Project Breakdown
This project spanned over 5 days. The first 4 days were spent meeting the team, planning the project and executing the vision. Day 5 was for presenting the project to all other teams in a public showcase. My team began with many different ideas for our game and we settled on a boxing simulator akin to punch-out. We worked in Unreal Engine 5 and created the controller using a makey-makey tool kit. Between each day we tested our game to see how players felt using our controller and we focused on observing how players moved.
Our goal was to get players moving, at least somewhat like a boxer would. Our first prototype only had punching and through testing we found that players were very stiff and did not mimic the fluid movements that boxers have. To help remedy this a bit I proposed stepping pads which would allow the player to dodge. The first version of the game only had offense from the player, now the ai could fight back. This worked great as it forced the player to get into the motions of combat more.
Below are some images from the whole process.
What I Learned
Time management for this project was a big learning experience. Nobody on our team had experience making alternate controllers, so splitting our time between the creation of the controller and creating the game was very hard. Our team lost a lot of time from trying to make each version of the controller pretty. On future alt. controller projects it will be majorly important to focus on the intent of the controller design rather that the aesthetics (at least to start). Additionally, we found the most success when we made iterations based on the feedback we received from playtesters. Our most elegant designs were based off of the insights given from our players and it really showed me the importance of the iterative process for game design.