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A Boy and His beard

 

Released: 2018

Platform: PC Steam

Description:

A boy and his beard is a fun twin-stick beat em up where you go around beating up people to steal their beards in order to unlock your true potential. Through the game, you fight great bearded people like Lumberjacks, Vikings, Pirates, Bikers, and even spooky Skeletons! 

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Tutorial1.gif

Contributions:

  • Production(scheduling) 

  • Game Design(Mechanics, enemies, balancing)

  • Created main Boy and template for others

  • Rigging

  • Animation

  • Polish

  • Publishing

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Design Goals:

Due to the odd nature of the controls for the game. We had to get players up to speed as fast as possible. I incorporated player discovery into the tutorial. Allowing the learning process for the mechanics to feel more natural. 

 

 

Tutorial2.gif

The Beard does something: 

Movement is one of the first things players do. I anticipated that action and populated the room with things that the beard will eventually interact with. Players are immediately given feedback when it hits something. They then follow up and it until it breaks. An indicator for the level up as well as the disappearance of the beard let players know they are doing the right thing. 

 

Grabbing Mechanic: 

Grabbing plays a big part in playing the game effectively. So just like the dummy, the chest also breaks. Letting the player know that they are on the right track. The kill cam style focus also emphasizes its importance. Both dialogue and an in-game icon give a hint that the player is on the right track. The door and key are obviously related so players quickly move to that area. 

 

Tutorial3.gif

Quicklinks

Designing interesting enemies: 

Each enemy had to have some variation to those core mechanics. A short description of their intentions is below and how we came to them.

Skelly.gif

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  • "Skellytons" - Projectiles cannot be knocked away, forcing the player to move. These are commonly first the interactions to get the player moving. 

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  • Bikers - Projectiles can be knocked away. This encourages players to get better moving the beard. Commonly spinning

Biker.gif

  • Lumber Jacks - Drop projectiles that impede the movement of the beard. Encouraging either to move away from the area or to manually swing the beard. 

 

 

Lumber.gif

  • Vikings - Have shields that require you to grab them and "rip" them off. Each shield has HP to allow players to "brute force" it if the message doesn't come across.

 

Viking.gif

  • Pirates - Suicide bombers allow players to concentrate on a specific target, instead of just blindly spinning 

Bomb.gif

What got cut!?!?

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Every game has to cut content for specific reasons. While that may be a necessity it is still awesome to see the process and what ifs. Click the image above to go to our gif image dump.
 

Special Thanks

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Want to spend the last bit of space on this page for the awesome team I had the privilege of working with!

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