Brawlygons
Brawlygons is 2-8 player brawler where players draw their own fighters as 2D polygons. Players smash, dash, twist and turn in physics-based battles to knock each other out of the ring.
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I conceived, designed, and programmed everything in Brawlygons by myself. Through years of off-and-on development, playtesting and iteration, Brawlygons has evolved into a unique, enjoyable party game.
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This game was developed in my free time, mostly just for fun. It has been rather popular at parties and social gatherings.
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Brawlygons was selected to be shown at ImagineNative's iNdigital Space in 2018.
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Brawlygons was made in Unity.
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Drawing Fighters
The main hook of Brawlygons is that every match you play, you get to draw your own custom shape to fight with. This makes the game different every time, and makes it particularly enjoyable for younger audiences.
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I wanted to give players a lot of freedom, but I also had to make sure every possible shape would work on a technical standpoint, so I settled on making shapes be drawn on a 5x5 grid.
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The main challenge was making the interface easy to understand. Initially, I tried to make things simple by only using two triggers (the same used in combat) and virtual highlightable buttons, but that just confused players. Turns out that everyone understands the A and B buttons, and the X button in a pinch, so I complicated the controls for the sake of understanding.
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When it comes to drawing the shapes, I used a simple dot-to-dot format, where players place vertices in the order that they want the shape to be formed. This method works really well with Unity's polygon collider, because it operates in virtually the same way, and most people seem to get a good grasp of it. However, the youngest of players (ages 4 - 7) seemed to have some trouble building the shapes they wanted, due to having to place the points in order. I will have to continue to work on making drawing even more intuitive, because this game is meant for players like them.
Combat
The goal when fighting in Brawlygons is to push your opponents out of the ring and be the last one standing. The controls are very simple -- players can only move and rotate, but it is all physics-based, providing a lot of nuance to the apparent simplicity, on top of the varied shapes.
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Initially, I wanted Brawlygons to be all about tension, like wrestling, so I made shapes stick to each other as they tried to push each other out of the ring. This worked in brawls between 3 or more players, but one-on-one matches were often a standoff.
Taking inspiration from Catastrophe, I tried making the shapes bouncy, and it made everything better. Matches were more dynamic, and one-on-ones were less stale. I added particle effects, and the game just felt better.
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In combat, different shapes have different properties, giving their unique nature more purpose. Larger shapes have more mass (if they aren't full of holes), and smaller shapes are faster. However, this proved impossible to balance, because no matter how fast the smallest shape was, it could not push the largest shape.
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In hopes of fixing the imbalance between large and small shapes, I gave them the ability to do a quick spin attack, which made them rotate violently, while disabling their movement. This varied gameplay a bit, but massive shapes were at an even greater advantage, being able to send small shapes flying with a single spin.
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My final solution to the balance issue came in two parts. Firstly, I cheated physics. Small shapes could move fast, but with no mass behind their velocity, it made no difference when colliding with big shapes. So, I made it so shapes apply a bonus force when colliding based on their speed, and that bonus increased the smaller the shape. This made it so small shapes could send even the largest of shapes reeling if they picked up enough speed. The only problem was, there was no way for them to do that.
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The second part of my solution fixed everything. I replaced the spin attack with a temporary dash, which amplifies both movement and turn speed, and then briefly disables the player's movement. For larger shapes, this works practically the same as their spin attack, but for small shapes, it allows them to turn on a dime and either sock it to their opponents, or dash out of the way.
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The dash ability rounded out the controls for the game, and made matches much more variable and dynamic. I added some visual effects, and now the game feels fantastic.
