I’m a long time user of Panda3D, but not so active on the forums.
I wanted to show off and promote a project me and my partner are working on. It’s called Bump N Brawl and it will be a top down fighting game. The objective of each match is to knock your opponents off the playing field. You achieve you goal by bumping into one another and using special abilities unique to each character.
We just launched a Kickstarter campaign for it. The link to the Kickstarter project is on the website. I believe this could be the first Panda3D game on Kickstarter! Am I wrong?
Finally, I just want to say how great the Panda3D community is! Keeping rocking guys!
Sorry, but I don’t see a potential. Where’s replayability value? How long do you think the player will be interested in pushing and throwing stuff? You could add some special items like timed bombs, which would push players away from it on explosion. Also you could make some tiles disappear overtime so it’d be harder to stay on the platform. Still, i believe it’ll sell only if you market it for kids. And I don’t see it succeeding on kickstarter. But good luck anyway.
Harsh words but potentially true. I admit that when you get into the grind of developing something you sometimes lose track of whether or not it’s any good. …And there comes a point where you put so much work into it you really don’t want to accept the fact that it might not be any good.
Many of the ideas you suggested are things we plan on implementing.
My hope was that the game would be somewhat tactical… placing yourself in the right position to optimally knock away your opponent. The characters’ special abilities aid in this.
So when you say it lacks replay-ability the first thing that comes to mind for me is a lack of moves for the characters to perform. Do you think if the characters all had about 3-4 special attacks that they could use in various situations that it might make things more interesting?
…Or do you believe that the core game play and objective is flawed?
Maybe part of the problem is we didn’t have enough to show and we should have waited one or two more months before promoting it. We’re already rapidly working on polishing it up and thinking about getting a playable demo out.
Anyways, thanks for your constructive criticism. This is what I need, ideas to make the game more palatable.
I wouldn’t say that, but I am not sure if PC is the right platform for this type of game. It looks more like a party game to me, even though you mentioned tactics. I imagine you could sell some copies if it was for XBox or Wii.
Btw, I played this kind of game on Playstation when I was a kid and I quite enjoyed it. It’s called Crash Bash. Here’s the video: youtube.com/watch?v=ydV940YWS1k You could do some research on it, how well it sold, are there any people who miss it and would like to play something like that again and maybe draw some gameplay ideas.
Yes I agree with that. It’s definitely meant to be a party game, multiplayer mayhem and all that. I would say my original vision for this game was a cross between Super Smash Bros and Bomberman. Both of which I would consider party games best played on consoles.
PC just happens to be the easiest platform to develop for, especially with engines like Panda3D. I admit I am still a newbie here, a game developer wannabe. I was considering XNA though before I found Panda, so maybe it’s time to go back and take another look.
I loved Crash Bash when I was little as well! I had almost forgotten about that game. I think we still have the disc lying around somewhere!
Yeah maybe I will go back and take a look at it and do some research.
It’s always great to hear that. That’s the goal, to make a fun game. We’ll keep working till we reach that goal!
Our main goal at the moment is to get some sort of demo out. We don’t have quite as much time as we did before, but it’s still coming along.
Some things we’re working on…
We’ve got about 8 characters in the pipeline at the moment, that’s in addition to the characters seen on the website. A total of 12!
The ‘pick up’ ability is going to be replaced with a ‘Common’ ability. These are abilities that all characters can use and the player can select which one they want before the start of a match. We haven’t decided yet if ‘pick up’ will be a common ability or removed altogether.
Finally, I’ve been slowly trumping through getting the menu interfaces together. Things like the character selection screen and map select.
