Project Name: Rumble Jack
My Role(s): Producer, Designer
Duration: 4 Weeks
Team Size: 5 Members
Game Engine: Unity
The Game
RumbleJack is a Beat ’em Up game that revolves around Jack defending his mountaintop from the hikers who stream up the sides of the cliffs. Jack can chain together hits and force the hikers either off the mountain or make them fade away after dealing enough damage.
Combat & Combos
Working within such a limited timespan, the pace at which I had to iterate and shift through ideas was rapid. Developing at these speeds allowed us to highlight what mechanics we thought were necessary and cut systems which were unobtainable. We went though multiple full gameplay systems before we settled on the area based Beat ’em Up Rumble Jack ended up being.
UI Elements
When designing the games UI I wanted to include both world space elements and general player HUD. The original pitch had two options for the world space portion of the UI. Either horizontally above the enemy or vertically behind the enemy. once I tested the two UI options the feedback I got regarding readability allowed me to pick the horizontal bar above the enemy. we then stylized this to the bubbles that are seen in the games final prototype.
The final UI in the prototype is displayed now as the watch on the characters wrist, and utilizes stylized cinema bars to help sell the action of the game. The combo counter shakes with the camera on every hit and displays the total damage done once the combo ends.
Cut Systems
Taking a look at some of the other concepts that got cut. Most of them were sent back to the drawing board because of the general scope they required of the team in such a limited time frame. Some of the ideas while liked by the team feel into this category. Here are a few of those pitched systems.
One of my personal favorites form the project that got cut was body swapping. In this instance the player was a ghost who would posses bodies in a top down level based game rather then the Beat ’em Up game we ended with.
When we decided to go with a Beat ’em Up game I had pitched us doing a single side scrolling level much like the origins of the genre. After testing the game as a side scroller we found that with the amount of content we would be able to produce in our timeframe most people wanted to just fight the enemies instead. This lead to our final change to the arena based game.
