The Blobs Fight
Local Multiplayer Beat-Em-Up Party Game
Level Design, Game Design, Environment Design, Production
The Blobs Fight
The Blobs Fight (Blobs) is a top down local multiplayer beat-em-up game where each player controls a wacky little blob creature. The game supports 2-8 players in multiplayer and 1-8 players in the PvE horde mode MobBlobs.
There are multiple gamemodes, but the gist of the game loop is that you dash to attack, and if you hit another blob you knock a small bit of them off. You can then collect it to get bigger and more powerful, but ultimately slower and easier to hit. In the base mode Last Blob Standing the goal is to be either the largest or last one standing when the timer runs out.
My role in this project was very much as a producer rather than a developer, but I did contribute to the level design process in terms of layout and design. Greyboxing the maps first in Unity, then once the layouts were fun, we had modelers create the map art and I would implement that along with the lighting.
Memorable Maps
My overarching goal with the maps for Blobs was to make them memorable maps. The notion I had in my head was the "hey, do you remember the lava map from that game, or the island map with the shark on it" etc. Thus the maps were built entirely on the levelo's theme. Castle is the "Castle map with the trap door and the cannons", Laser is the "Tron looking map with the laser walls", and so on.
The first step in a map's development was to figure out what the theme would be, and how we could strongly present that to the player artistically, musically, and mechanically. Since all the maps are like this, let's take one as an example; Factory.
With the theme decided, "Factory", I would look at the two areas of expertise I could add to, mechanical design and art direction. So artistically, Factory could be a number of things, but myself having just played through Portal 2, I thought strongly of a sinister dark mechanical place. One with moving parts, crushers, and general non-OHSA approved elements. With those dark corners, things like dim light coming in from the outside, small mechanical lights, and because this game is ridiculous, fires, would be our sources. So after playing around with some looks, varying levels of brightness, and a few mechanics like movable boxes or a carousel, we settled on the final 3 hazards of the map; conveyor belts that lead the player into a fire, crushers that telegraph their smash down and then slam into the ground, doing damage to any blob beneath them, and moveable crates that come in from the other end of the conveyor belts. The boxes were just for that environmental interaction game feel, they don't offer much other than possibly getting in the way of larger, heavier blobs.
Production Process
The goal of this project for us was to learn more about the process of taking a game to market, rather than an exercise in game design itself. As it turns out, taking a game to market for the first time, on your own, is really hard! But in 2018 the game was successfully launched on Steam, and the following year was ported to Xbox where it has seen more traction.
Having just come out of university, this would be our second production ready game together at SkyPyre and our second game using the Unity engine. While what was executed would come to be a fun game, you can see evidence in the game of our struggles to figure out how to collaborate and work together remotely (given that in school we all worked together in the studio space), as well as having to adapt to new tools like Blender rather than Maya.
Production-wise I learned a lot about managing the flow of work and expectations of progress, particularly as it pertains to a small indie team that all have other fulltime careers. If I could go back again, I'd establish the actual scope of the project much earlier in development, and knowing that would have been a lot less frustrated by the length of the production.
Check out SkyPyre's page on Blobs or check it out on itch.io, Steam, or Xbox:
