What Fall Guys Should Have Been: Designing a Casual Physics-Based Multiplayer Game

I decided to work on a different project with the same guiding principle of avoiding the trope of death in games: KickChick, a multiplayer game where you play as chickens who try to knock each other around with physics-based powerups. The appeal will be to players who are looking for a casual, humorous game to play with friends who have a variety of skill levels that also boasts a decent skill ceiling. I’ll be taking inspiration from explosive mechanics in Team Fortress 2 and shaping this game to become what Fall Guys should have been. (More on this take in future blog posts!)

The game should be easy to implement, which means that its strength will be in its design. For example: if there is no death in the game, and therefore no respawning or resetting a player’s position, how do you encourage strategy and give some players an advantage over others? In a shooter like Team Fortress 2, when one player dies, their position is reset to the spawn point. An easy but flawed solution for KickChick would be to say: well, have things like pits, where players have to spend a while climbing out. That essentially limits their position for a time, and gives the player outside of the pit an advantage. However, this can become problematic in gameplay: deep pits can allow players outside to knock players into pits continually, which can become frustrating. I forsee plenty of playtesting.

I’d been scratching at an ARPG based on a premade project that Unity provides, but its organization of classes has me stumped. While programming with the existing project’s files has taught me about good code organization and reading code, it’s been about three weeks, and I’m struggling with calling the right class to implement a damage function. The project makes it easy to implement variations of pre-programmed items, but it’s introducing new mechanics that I struggle with. I still hope to work on it, or something like it, eventually—maybe when my understanding of programming grows.

My goal for next Wednesday:

Design & implement the base combat system for KickChick

Implement and playtest one PvP level

Goals for 2wks from now:

Design and implement 2 – 3 powerups

Implement and playtest a second [co-op] and third PvP level

Goals for 3wks from now:

[Make a UI and character selection]

Design and begin to implement a progression/character selection system