High 5 Rumble

Overview

A silly fighting game about trying to high five your opponent This is a game I've been working on for a wee while about high fiving and fighting. It's my first real big project in Godot and the biggest game I've made by myself. It's been a fun, great and humbling learning experience especially when it came to doing things other than programming and working in engine.

Summary

High 5 Rumble is a fighting game based around high fiving your opponent. With a wacky array of characters fight your way to become the rumbling champ!

Making the game

The idea

I had this idea for a 3D platformerish game where you could highfive *everything* that was going to be goofy and wacky and ideally fun. I know from experience that the scope of that game is going to be really big. Sadly I work full time and have other life commitments so it would take years to make and I wanted to make a game that wasn't going to take years. So I decided to condense the idea down and figure out what the core game mechanic really was and make a game around that. I ended up with the idea to make a boxing game like the wii sports boxing but instead about high fiving. I had done a few random bits and bobs with Godot and wanted to pursue using that engine so I began making something in Godot.

Godot

I chose to create the game in Godot in C# as I wanted to expand out of Unity. There were several reasons for this: First being that I always liked Godot as a thing, by that I mean an open source game engine but also the vibes around Godot. Secondly I wanted to expand my skillset and push myself to learn something new and sadly none of my machines really run Unreal. Finally the Unity pricing drama was enough to leave a sour taste in my mouth with the engine. Admittedly I'm unsure if the pricing would have ever affected me, I'd need to personally release a game properly myself but I had/have the intentions to someday.

I've learned a lot creating this game in Godot, I've learned a lot in general from making this game which I will go into more casual detail in a blog post but I think going forward I would create more solo / small projected in Godot.

Art

I talked about scope and about trying to minimise it and that was due to my experience working on games as a programmer and understanding what it takes to implement and what is realistically feasible for my abilities. This thinking did NOT transfer to my ambitions for the art and so reality very quickly shot that down. Initially I wanted to do a mix media thing with 2D and 3D art and different art styles. I opened blender for the 4th time in my life and tried texturing and UV unwrapping for the first time and was met with a harsh dose of reality. So for the most part the game ended up being silly 2D sprites as that is as far as my art ability really lets me go. It was also a good learning experience getting to understand more of the art pipeline, at my job I get given art from the artists and then I implement that in the game engine. What artists did to get me that art may as well been magic, now having to do it myself I realise it is magic. Not actually, but it is a skill that I'd like to try and improve more.