BrickBender

Inspiration

The faulty construction of the WEB DuBois Library with its famous falling bricks inspired us. We also took ideas from popular arcade games of the past, wanting players to be able to join and leave whenever.

What it does

BrickBender is a fast-paced arcade-style video game with snappy combat, fun graphics, and a tribute to our good friend Sam the Minuteman. Players compete for points, avoiding falling bricks on the side of the library while trying to hit bricks towards their opponent. More points at the end of the timed round wins.

There is also a rudimentary bot-AI that takes over either of both players when a person isn't controlling them.

How we built it

We used the game engine Godot along with the animation tool FlipaClip. Over the past few days, we've done a lot of playtesting amongst ourselves, strangers, and random passers by. This feedback along with the core tenets of our idea led us down the development path to where we are now.

Challenges we ran into

The bot-AI definitely was an interesting challenge as we had to sort of delineate our own approaches to playing the game and represent that with sensors and responses in code. Aside from that, the only big hiccups came from interfacing Godot with Github since there are strange files that can sometimes easily get messed up in pull requests.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of the ability to join and leave at any time, and the fact that our movement/combat feel relatively fluid and responsive. We are super stoked that we got to incorporate so many people's feedback and that it's turned out rather polished.

What we learned

From new tools like FlipaClip to new strategies like the Godot AnimationPlayer node, we've explored a lot of new territory over the last couple days. We've tried to add more juice (game feel) in this game than we have in past projects, and have gained a greater appreciation of how that affects a game and how important it is.

What's next for BrickBender

When the world needed The BrickBender, he was nowhere to be seen. We now know where he's been-- Just vibing on the side of the library punching bricks. Sam has no comment so far on where he'll go next, but maybe his next frontier will be The Final Frontier