Hello everyone, I’m Sam Boydstun, the Lead Designer for Builder’s Brawl. This is our very first development log, and we as a team are excited to share the backbone and framework that will eventually become a wacky fun competitive building and fighting game.

As a team of fifteen students at California State University, Chico, we are setting out to complete this game in a period of four months and have a result that lives up to our standards.

Builder’s Brawl is a two-player competitive game where two clumsy amateur builders are given the most dangerous wilderness building jobs in the world. With almost zero carpentry skills at their disposal expect to see a whole lot of rickety planks nailed together in crazy directions (That can support that, right?). And for the competitive part, whichever player reaches the other side of the gap first, wins the game. Since your building isn’t really your selling point, you may have to fight your opponent to get across first. Unfortunately, you really aren’t the best fighter either. Yikes.

Here’s where we are at after the first stage of development – Dev Blog 1.0

Concept to Creation:

First and foremost, to create Builder’s Brawl, we needed to put the game’s vision onto paper and visualize everything from the art style to the look of the environments. In the course of two weeks we concepted the design for the characters, three levels, assets to fill those levels and the boards players will lay down. Furthermore we laid the backbone of the scene matrix, creating a menu screen as well as a control screen and tying those together to start the network.

The Characters 

The art inspiration for Builder’s Brawl’s characters is rooted in the game Gang Beasts. We wanted to combine the construction worker feel with the gelatinous goofy characters of Gang Beasts. Both artists created a concept (pictured above), and we combined the ideas to come to the result of this:

The Boards:

In a game that’s focused on clumsy amateur building, we wanted to give the players the zero tools to create a bridge that looks nice. Planks will be laid end over end, in any direction but straight. Players will tight rope across these poorly nailed planks and hope to get to the other side safely. 

The boards will be carried by players and will connect either to the environment or another board. Here’s a brief early example of how they lay down when a player would place them: 

The Maps:

Builders Brawl’s level design is focused around two key concepts: player to player interaction and intimate up close combat. Each level we create focuses on bringing the players into close proximity and forcing them to battle over the space they share. We also wanted to create levels that would impact the player through forces of nature, and require them to adapt to changing obstacles and stressors while at the same time they fight each other. In this stage of development we concepted, blocked out and began to test three levels, the volcano, the river and the railroad.

The Volcano: 

Concept art on the volcano level focused around forcing the players into close contact for the duration of the game and give them an environmental stressor of building boards across an active volcano. The volcano will explode every so often, killing the players if they are on the boards. 

The River:

One of the main focuses in the early design phase was to think of ways we could creatively make each map feel like its own unique battleground with its own specific strategy. The River was envisioned here to be the first level that incorporated platforms in the gap for players to landmark to. This will be the first taste of players feeling like they are building to a destination that will be worth fighting over for map supremacy. 

The River Level’s First Blockout

The Railroad Level:

The Railroad level is the first attempt at taking the idea of close player proximity to the extreme. A level in which players share the same space for the entirety of the level. They are always in a “hallway” in terms of level design, building planks on the broken tracks and constantly having to pass each other. We want to test early in development if this is a good plan for the game going forward, or should we have  more open levels. 

 The Railroad Level's First Blockout

The Camera:

The most significant thing we accomplished this development period was laying down the framework of the camera. Huge design ideas are attributed to the way the camera operates, from the intimate combat we want, the level designs and most importantly, the feel of the game. The most challenging aspect was wanting to have the camera zoom in as players got closer together and still have the flexibility to have it pan out and allow them to see the level if they separate. The key was to find a balance in which this wasn’t disorienting and allowed for a great up close focus on combat.

The Animation

In these early concepting stages, we have also been heavily looking forward to what’s down the road for us in polishing this game and making it be interactive. Animation is a big part of this and our three animators have been working on creating storyboards of future actions that capture the feel of the game and the wacky style we are going for. Rigging the character should be done in a week or so and its exciting to get these guys to work.  

Pictured: Board Slam - Charge - Push

From everyone here on the Builder's Brawl team, we want to thank you for checking out our first Dev Log! We are looking forward to having more content to show you in the coming weeks and are excited to drive this project forward. Next on our list is getting our first prototype up and running and implementing the basic combat features. 

-BB Team