Gladihoppers - A 2D Physics Gladiator Game (Devlog)

​

Gladihoppers is a physics based 2D gladiator game where you rise to glory as a fighter in the arenas of Rome by defeating opponents in gruesome duels, earning denarii, and upgrading your character and equipment in the process.

Gameplay
The character movement and attacks are controlled by directional swipes (left, right, up, down) with your thumbs on both sides of the screen. A combination of the inverted pendulum physics (popularized by Soccer Physics) and 2D animations are used to achieve this.

Planned Features

• 3 game modes: Career mode (singleplayer), Arcade mode (singleplayer) and Quick Fight mode (singleplayer and same-screen multiplayer).
• Play as fighters from three different peoples (for now); Romans, Gauls, and Nubians, unlocking more characters by earning denarii in the career mode.
  
• Lots of unique pieces of equipment of various sorts to buy and unlock: swords, axes, maces, hammers, shields, armors, tunics, helmets, wrist guards, gloves, pants, shin guards, boots and sandals.
  
• Gain Fame with your gladiator in career mode by winning duels and completing certain objectives. Fame will determine things such as the arena you fight in, the crowd size and ultimately be the highscore as your character is defeated.

Screenshots
(More recent screenshots can be found in posts below.)

The game is still in very early development and everything is obviously subject to change.





About This Devlog
I plan on keeping this thread up to date with the current state of the game and share the progress. Please feel free to come with critique and suggestions! I realize it's not super detailed right now but I'm still kind of figuring things out as I go, so I'll add more information with each post.

Thanks for reading!

 

Thanks! I'll make sure to let you know whenever I need beta testers if you're still up for it then!

This week I haven't done a whole lot. I wanted to make the game a bit more bloody but things, uh... Things quickly got out of hand... Who needs an E rating anyway, am I right?

 

Not yet unfortunately, it's still early in development so expect a couple of months at least.

So this week I think I've finished working on the damage calculations.



The base multiplier is determined by the body part hit (head and torso hits cause more damage to health where as leg and arm hits cause more damage to stamina [which I haven't implemented yet]). The impact velocity (the two characters' combined movement speeds) also affects the base multiplier, meaning that you'll take more damage if you run into your opponent's weapon as opposed to moving away from it.

An attribute multiplier and an equipment multiplier is then added to the base multiplier. These are simply the attacker's strength and weapon stats weighed against the defender's endurance and armor stats (the armor of the body part hit, that is). In the screenshot above the character being hit has no leg armor so the stat is 0 and his endurance is 0 as well (which is a bug I need to fix because everyone is supposed to start with at least 1 strength, endurance and stamina).

The resulting multiplier is then multiplied with a base damage number before a random damage (between -3 and 3) or a critical attack damage (more likely to happen with a high strength attribute value) is added to give us the final damage of the attack.

It's not a very complex method of calculating the damage of an attack but it was a lot more complicated than I had originally thought. I will probably leave it like this unless it turns out to be unbalanced later on when I've added more equipment. Next thing I'll do is to work on the Career mode because I need to get started on everything surrounding the actual gameplay to make sure things make sense and that there's actually some kind of purpose to playing the game.

 

Hello again.

I didn't work on the game for most of December and January but I'm back now with a small update on how things are going. I've started writing the CPU opponent script because I'm kind of getting to the point where the game loop is almost closing and I want to play test with a proper enemy. So far I've only managed to get the CPU to block somewhat decently (I don't want to make it OP).

I've also added some smaller things like shields breaking.

 

HAHA, well I'll take that as a compliment.

Yeah! I've actually made it a bit bloodier now!

---

So it's been a while since the last devlog but I'm back with some updates! I've mainly been working on two things for the past month (not counting all the small tweaks I've been doing).

The Arenas
In the career mode you'll be progressing with your character and gaining fame, which will be represented by bigger crowds coming to see the fights but also by actually fighting in bigger arenas. The way I've planned is for there to be five arenas for the launch of the game with the possibility of more being added in future updates. Since the career mode is really just an endless arcade "get the best highscore" mode, you'll keep playing in the last arena until you're eventually defeated.

The arenas will be: a gladiator school, a village in Gaul, an arena in Egypt, a big arena on the Italian peninsula (I'm thinking the amphitheatre in Ariminum), and finally, of course, the Colosseum.

The Combat
So the combat was kind of ready a while back, but I've been going over it again and added a couple of new things. There are now five things you can do: overhead slash, high stab, low stab, block and a pommel strike (to push the opponent away [gif below is a slight exaggeration ).



I've also made distinctions between what kind of hits you can land. There are now whiffs (when an attack is so weak it doesn't draw blood), normal hits (that draw blood) and critical hits that stun the opponent and interrupt their current action. The likelihood of a critical hit is determined by your strength versus the opponent's endurance, but there's also a small random element to it.



Furthermore I've been playing around with some camera shake and on-screen blood effects to give more visual feedback to the combat, but I need to work on it a bit more.

 

Hey!

So there's been a couple of changes lately. First of all, I decided to shift my attention towards finishing the Quick Fight mode before continuing anything else. The reason I didn't do this before was because I had originally planned to have the Career mode be a very simple highscore arcade kind of game mode, where as the Quick Fight mode would be a little bit more complicated to make as you are able to customize your character. But as time went by, the Career mode started to feel less like a simple highscore mode and more like a true, well... Career mode. With stats, upgrades and lots of menus to go through before moving on to the next fight. And I definitely want to keep it that way, because I think it's fun to see your character progress to the extent you can now. But at the same time I want there to be a game mode that can give you endless action with little time spent staring at menus. And most of all, I wanted to have a playable version of the game done as soon as possible.

So I slapped together a character selection screen and some customization tabs and finished the Quick Fight mode. At the same time I also implemented support for XBOX controllers and keyboard and uploaded a Windows PC demo build on itch.io.



In the video you can hear part of the first song of the soundtrack that is being produced by Red Forge (www.redforgemusic.com). The overall sound quality might be a bit metallic, but that's my fault for screwing up the audio when screen recording.

Now my plan is to create a real Arcade mode, before continuing work on the Career mode. This shouldn't take too long, since I've got a pretty good idea already of what I want to make. Long story short, you'll play as the Emperor's bodyguard, a former gladiator, and your job is to defend the Emperor as the Imperial Palace is being overrun with barbarians. You'll fight them off one by one until you're eventually defeated and your kill count will be your highscore.

The thing I still haven't decided though is whether or not I'll release the game with or without the Career mode. I'm leaning towards releasing it without and adding the Career mode in an update shortly after release. But I'm gonna have to wait and see how things develop in the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading!

 

This is just a quick update to let you know things have changed... yet again. I'm only now starting to work on the Arcade mode, since I've been busy up until now with implementing a very popular suggestion people had: throwing weapons. More on that in the devlog video below if you're interested.

But now, as mentioned, I'm going to focus on the Arcade mode. I'm hoping to have it mostly done before my vacation in a couple of weeks. After that I'll look at polishing the combat a bit more and then it should be ready for release on mobile. So Quick Fight and Arcade mode for the release and then a Career mode in an update following that. Those are my plans for now but knowing myself I wouldn't be surprised if they changed! :-D

 

Thank you! I'll probably beta test on Android, because I have no iPhone or Mac anymore and it will take some weeks before I can buy them.

---



So I'm getting pretty close to wrapping up the kind of "minimum viable product"-version of the game. I've done some more work on the menus. In the screenshot above you can see the Quick Fight menu that now contains some much needed information regarding how well equipped the players are (red is total attack rating and green is total defense rating). There's also a balance of power indicator at the top which will quickly tell you whether or not the characters are evenly matched.

I've also nearly completed the Arcade mode. Left to do is some more work on that mode's respective menus but the actual gameplay part is done... aside from some more enemy variation.



Thanks for reading.

 

So for the past week I've mostly been chipping away at the Arcade mode. But I also finally added more equipment to the game. There are now roughly 90 items in the game, between different armors, weapons, shields, helmets, hairstyles, and so on. I've also taken the time to balance the stats.


Some randomized characters.

Much of the equipment isn't maybe what you would typically expect from a gladiator game. In fact, that is kind of a dilemma I've been having lately. The few environments I've modeled so far and the two game modes don't have that much to do with gladiatorial fights other than the 1 vs 1 aspect of the Quick Fight mode. The story behind the Arcade mode is completely separated from any sort of gladiator theme. But I'm just going to have to rely on the idea that in the future it will make sense with more "arena"-like arenas, and the fact that the Career mode will be about playing and leveling up a character through 1 vs 1 fights.

One new feature that I've implemented, that originally I had thought would be exclusive to the Arcade mode, is a "trainer"-like character that can stand on the sideline and help the fighters out. For now they're able to throw stones at the enemy, hand you some wine (health potion) or a new shield if yours is broken. In the Quick Fight mode, the game settings menu will most likely include a toggle for each one of these abilities, so you can decide how you want to play. I think this adds an extra layer to the gameplay and hopefully it will increase the longevity of the game.


Emperor throwing a healing potion.

So in the Arcade mode it's the Emperor who functions as the trainer character and will react differently to the character you are playing as and help you out depending on your character's "perk". The idea behind this is to offer the player different ways to play the Arcade mode and maybe find a favorite character that suits their play style best. There will also be an invisible trainer character beyond the enemy spawn that throws stones if you get too close, in order to discourage you from spawn killing incoming enemies. I still need to figure out how often the Emperor, and trainers in general, should assist you during battle. It certainly won't be like in the gif below.


Probably needs a small impact FX for the stones.

Tomorrow I will start adding more sounds, polish some of the old ones and then there aren't really that many more items on my to do list.

 

Famous last words. Turns out that if you add things to your to do list, it grows.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've been working on new sounds this week. Specifically more context aware UI sounds. But as I took some time away from making sounds in order to reflect on what best suited which action, I managed to convince myself that the combat system was too simple and that people would get bored of it quickly. At first I was only going to change the touch input for the block move because it didn't really feel right to swipe to block. But then I thought: what if you're always blocking?

So now there are two stances in the game. A high stance where if you have a shield, you will automatically be blocking the attacks that hit it. And then there's a low stance that somewhat protects your lower body. With emphasis on "somewhat" because there's really only a small chance your weapon will deflect an attack, since the shield isn't covering your legs in this stance.


6 attacks, 2 stances and 1 cool looking mustache that I wish I could grow IRL.

Now as you can see, this led to a bunch of new attacks. The idea I had was to balance the two stances by giving some pros and cons to each one of them. The high stance is obviously better in terms of being able to block with a shield, but it's impossible to deflect attacks while idling in this stance (however, it's possible to deflect attacks if you attack at the same time and parry the enemy's weapon, but this is true for the other stance as well). On top of this, the high stance also slightly decreases the speed at which you move. Its attacks are slower as well, although they do a little bit more damage.

Also as you are able to see in the gif above, one attack from each stance will transition you into the opposite stance upon completion. These are the down swipe for the high stance, and the up swipe for the low stance. I thought this would be a neat addition to the combat since it opens up an opportunity in the future for me to add something like a combo bonus if you string together two or more attacks from different stances.

Alright, so now I really should be going back to finishing the sounds I started on. Hopefully next week I will have a video that will showcase the improvements I've made to the sounds in the game, because I felt that they weren't really adding to the game as much as they could be doing before. But now it's starting to, in lack of a better word, sound better.