Earlier this year I started putting in real effort on a idea that has been with me for quite some time... It’s a project called Box Brawl and the idea was to create some sort of court based sports game influenced by dodge ball. It would feature combat game play with a cast of creatively constructed paper craft characters. As the year dragged on unfortunately some steam was lost and production came to a halt. I’m not 100% sure I’ll come back to the idea, but instead of letting the project rot on a hard-drive, I figured it would be better to share what was built. Who knows, maybe it will motivate me to pick it up again.
The initial idea was born when I saw this video titled Boxwars, which I would recommend a quick view. It’s a hilarious mix of creativity and destruction. I feel there is such an affinity and imaginative aspect towards making things with cardboard that many (both young & old) can relate to. After spending some time gathering my thoughts in an initial pitch deck (Google Slides), I finally decided at the beginning of the year to dive in head first and create a new project in UE4.
With the help of many tutorials and some very helpful colleagues I was super happy to have a simple prototype up and running fairly quickly. I’ve been fortunate so far to have a pretty well rounded career, but as they say, “if you don’t use it, you lose it”. This was a great opportunity to jump into some areas outside of my “UI” wheelhouse; I could try some modeling, animation, & dare I say visual scripting!?
So before I bore you with a wall of text, have a quick look at the various screenshots and videos in the post. You can see what one of the courts looks like in-game as well as a quick lil’ video I tossed together. It has some game play footage spliced in and more importantly it gives me a chuckle seeing the characters move around. Check it out!
If you missed the link the first time, I think it’s worth checking out my pitch deck (Google Slides), as it gives some context into my thoughts.
As I eluded to before, there were a whole bunch of things to figure out. Starting a larger project like this meant there would be a handful of things that I haven’t done before (or at least touched in a really long time). I’ve compiled a list below that might be of interest to industry folk.
Modeling
I got my start in games creating props, buildings and the occasional vehicle or two quite some time ago. As I specialized more into the UI realm, this part of my life slowly fell into the background. I needed some tool to get back into modeling and for me that was Blender. In my previous life I was most comfortable with 3DS Max, but I was so impressed with what I saw in Blender. This open source free software is a godsend and I can see why it’s been catching on with the industry.
Texturing
I realize I am dating myself here, but the texturing / material creation workflow has improved so much I dove into Substance Painter for this project and again was blown away by how relatively intuitive and deep this tool was. There were a handful of pre-made cardboard materials ready to be used which made getting started a breeze.
Rigging & Animations
I was most worried about what I was going to do about rigging and animating these characters. It has been 6 or 7 years since I last did any rigging in 3DS Max and my Blender skills weren’t quite ready to take on the task yet. The more I asked and looked around, I found out about these “auto-riggers” which can automatically skin and rig character meshes. I went with Mixamo (another Adobe product), which worked fairly well. The T-Pose and animations imported into Unreal fairly well. Plus, I could bring the rigged character back into Blender to do some simple cleanup if it was needed.
Engine
Being honest here, I prefer and maintain the opinion that creating UI is better in Unity than Unreal. BUT, overall, Unreal seems much more approachable from the viewpoint of a non-technical type person such as myself to get something up and running. I was able to use the 3rd Person template as a good base to start from and then started modifying it from there. My first prototype began more as a simple “soccer-like” game, but it was really motivating to see working so quickly.
What I really liked about this project is the ideas it generated were seemingly limitless. Most people that I have shown it to would inevitably piggy back on the vision contributing their own great ideas. This led to and inspired new power up mechanics, different game modes, health mechanics, create your own character, etc. Before too long, I pulled in one of my coworkers to help me turn it into a real project with a repository and everything. Box Brawl was turning into a proper project with a core loop and infrastructure to build upon.
My ultimate goal was to create a project that could get up on early access, which obviously I’m disappointed that it didn’t happen. Ultimately, I wish I had the know-how and resources to bring this completely to fruition, but you know how game dev can go. Oh, and did I mention 2020 happened? But, at least I gained some knowledge along the way and am confident it at least had some potential.
Finally, I gotta give credit where credit is due, while this started as a solo project, I quickly roped in many of my work buddies to help out in various capacities. I’m sure I have forgotten a few, but truly many thanks to them. Oh, and thanks to Fishlabs which game their blessing to work on this outside of work.
Alessa | Code and tech art magic and for setting up a repository for the project
Niels | Helped on a handful of gameplay mechanics
Denis | Early geo blockouts & Paintovers
Micka | Paintovers
Erick | Paintovers
PChan | Design guidance & sounding board
Jonas | Design guidance & sounding board
As always, thanks for stopping by!