Sluggerpunk
Set in the year 2069, a totalitarian future where all hope for competitive sports has been lost everywhere but in the underground, where illegal battle sports started to rise in popularity as a means to fight back the governments that pushed them underground.
These degenerates are known in the underground as sluggerpunks.
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This project has been worked both in 3D and in 2D, with the most recent and polished version being the 2D version made in Godot 4.
Development in Godot
A futuristic/cyberpunk action RPG where you fight using sports-related items, but primarily a baseball and bat. A bullet hell where you are in control.
Currently, the game has a great number of features, including many player abilities that can be unlocked as the player completes challenge rooms as they play through a run.
They also can obtain coins that are used to purchase permanent items that they can wear, such as the Recall Glove, which lets them recall all of their baseballs back to them, or more recently, the Robot Arm, which is an arm that attaches to the player and lets them create walls from which their baseballs can bounce off of.
Early Development
Initially, the idea was to create a Survivors-style game using Sluggerpunk mechanics, but it evolved into something more complex.
Development in Unreal Engine
Sluggerpunk was originally a project done for Full Sail as our capstone thesis, it began as a goal to make a roguelike similar to Risk of Rain 2 or Hades, but in First-Person. Of course, another one of our inspirations was Gunfire Reborn, from where we derived a lot of the level design.
My main role during this project was systems and mechanics design and implementation. One of my focus points was the player's ranged combat abilities, which consisted of throwing baseball projectiles that could later be controlled telekinetically to do a variety of different actions, from converging at a single point, returning to the player, bouncing to nearby targets, among other features.
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We started getting feedback that this mechanic should become our focus to make it as fun as possible which encouraged me to develop the mechanic further with the use of special abilities. I implemented what we call the Momentum Meter system, in which the game charges up a meter while the player is moving, and will drain that meter when the player is idle. This was designed to keep players moving at a constant pace without stopping since in our game that will most likely get you killed. This system would fill up charges that the player can use to activate their current special. I implemented four specials for this game, including Barrage, Portal Balls, Grapple Ball and Freeze.
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The roguelike aspect of the game comes in the form of a three-tier upgrade system I designed and developed that keeps each run fresh. We have 20+ upgrades in the game at the moment, which have three tiers each, so for example, an upgrade that increases attack speed might have a 10% increase in the bronze tier, 20% in the silver tier and 30% in the gold tier. However, this is a specific example of a flat number increase, since a lot of the upgrades have vastly different functionality in-between tiers, there are upgrades such as Bat-Fu, that give the player an extra hit in their melee combo on Bronze, but then have this extra hit be able to stun enemies when the upgrade is at silver, or launch enemies into the air at gold tier.