Sackboy: A big adventure

Balloon Ballista

4 Players and 4 Controllers needed to play

Overview

Balloon Ballista is team based PVP game where teams try to shoot each other down in perilous dynamic environments.

Pilots skillfully guide your balloon and archers out shoot the other team.
Use powers ups, environmental hazards and your skills to come out on top.

Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Genre: PvP, Coop, Arcade, Side scroller
Number of Players: 4
Responsibilities: Game Design, Scripting, Project Management

Production Time: 3 weeks

Team size: 6

Balloon Ballista was our entry to the Sumo Digital Pune (Formerly Sumo Video Games) internal game jam. We won the Best Game award.

We drew inspiration from classics like Worms and Balloon Fighter. Most of the gameplay mechanics was scripted by Udain and I using Unreal engine blueprints.

Mechanics

Power ups
Wind
Hazards
Randomised levels

Postmortem

Initially we wanted to learn something new like replication and focus on networked multiplayer or have splitscreen. However implementing replication in unreal was too time consuming and we canned it in favour of a shared screen couch coop setting.

What went right

We prioritised tasks and got the core gameloop implemented
We kept ideas open during production and could iterate and add new features.
Music and SFX were good enough to convey feedback.
Powers ups push players to do actions other than shooting at each other.

What went wrong

Player onboarding was almost nil.
Death screen was abrupt, leaving players confused.
Power ups did not communicate what they were.
Lack of keyboard mouse controls leaves out many from quickly playing the game.

Lessons learnt

Dont push wishlisted features into production without polishing core game loop.
Leave more time for playtest and iteration.
Prioritise the player experience first.
Have a better onboarding/tutorial.
Have more robust and explicit gameplay mechanics feedback systems so that we do not have to explain to the players how to play.

Overall it was fun and intense experience, especially continuing after a normal workday.

We learnt a lot and maybe if we had six months or a year fulltime, this project could have been pushed into a full PC/Console game release.