Intro

I've started developing a very simple idea, with the goal to make it into a party game in January of 2024. The idea started with me sending the following sketch to one of my friends and describing the game mechanics.

The game mechanics were the following: there is one big player, and many small players. The big players goal is to stay inside, while the small ones are pushing him out. Simple right? Well you are not wrong, as the proof of concept of the idea was developed within the same day, and I sent the video over to the same friend (I cannot upload the video here, due to the platform's limitations, but the only thing you can see is small balls pushing the big one in the direction they are relative to the big ball's center).

Initial design problems

So now I had a working demo of the mechanics I want to apply to the game, but a lot of things are missing.

- The game is asymmetric, who wins if 1 player is against 3? Is it fair to have one round only randomly assign a player and score based on this asymmetric setup?

- How about the other players? How do they play the game? I'm not going to be able to create a network game within reasonable amount of time. 

- Will this be fun?

Let's tackle these questions separately:

Fairness of the game: It will never be fair to have only one round and score players based on how good they performed on their role, if they don't have the possibility to be tried on all roles. We needed more rounds. Good, now we have a system with multiple rounds, how do we actually score? At first I was going with the attacker score and defender score system. Attacker score had to be maximised and defender score minimised. I really liked this idea as different people could have different strengths, and the game was assigning roles fully randomly, so you had the chance to not be a defender (big guy) at all.

Controls:

The initial controls of the system were similar to the overcooked shared controller setup, so 4 players could play on 2 controllers, one joystick each. This idea was later dropped, as it seemed like a more reasonable approach, to get rid of 1000-1500 lines of legacy code custom wrapper, in favour of the new unity input system.

Will this be fun? 

This was the main question for me. I've spent 4-6 months in development of the POC, and I was wondering what my friends will think. To my surprise, all of them were enjoying the game, one of them is the competitive style player, the other one is the "play for fun and laughs" player and the other one has only played Counter Strike and Need For Speed 10+ years ago. This gave me a huge boost of motivation, but I had to sort a lot of things out before I was going to call it a game.

For reference, this is what the game looked like at the time:

Starting anew

After my successful POV, I had some other questions to attend to:

- The code was messy, and unmaintainable

- The game was dull after 30-40 minutes of play, even with the best group for a party game

- The graphics were soulless

- The UI was a mess

Code Refactoring:

There's not much to say here. I had to start a new project, with the new requirements added to my list. My game was more intentional than before, so I could design the code better the next time I was developing. 

3 major changes to note: 

1. I dropped the old input system for the new one for easier input handling as mentioned before

2. I started using ScriptableObject -s to make the game easily configurable

3. Since I overused ScriptableObjects now, I had to start using the OdinInspector package to preserve my sanity. This saved up a lot of time for me, and also helped keep up my motivation. As I had to do a lot of tedious edits without it.

Addressing the game's "dullness"

The game was always going to pivot from the original idea, because it provides little replay-ability. This issue was resolved when I understood a balance issue: the attacker defender score are not good indicators, because there is no clear winner, so I had to move the a scoring where the players are taking turns to be the Big Bullies and the one with the longest survivability was going to win. 

The game became best of 3, so there was a clear winner in at least 3 rounds. But still it felt empty.. I started addressing the general idea of the scoring and came up with a system for different team compositions (2v2 games where everyone is paired with everyone at least once, 1v3 games, where each player is the solo player at least once) and different scoring, so I had to test my theory. 

That's how we got Hide'N'Seek which differs from Tug Of War as the score (time) should be minimised, meaning you need to catch everyone faster than the others. We also got Duck Hunt where only 4 players can queue up, and each player is paired with all others.

Now the game was getting in shape, we had some variability and a randomised mini game.

In terms of variability, we had one more change: spices. As any good idea: I was pitching some idea to one of my friends, he misunderstood, told me what he understood, I misunderstood and loved the new idea. That's how we have some random collectable modifiers that can influence the outcome of the game, and help preserve the players' interests.

About the graphics

I wanted to leave graphics to the last, because it's the most noticeable change in the game. 

Tug Of War Evolution in screenshots:

2024. June

2024. Sep

2024. Oct

I'm pretty happy with the final outcome. The players were hand drawn on paper and then re-drawn in gimp and are now animated based on their emotions. About 3 A4 papers worth of players were drawn by hand.

UI updates

2024. June

2024 Sep

The join lobby was the same, but I added a main menu as well, with the working title of Cosmic Chaos. This title was originated from the idea, that the game would be an olympic for planets where they need to compete from one another, but one of my friends said the game looks like the 3 players are bullying the big one, so it became Bully Ball Brigade.

2025 Jan

The whole UI was reworked to be easier to understand and be better for the eyes.

In retrospect

I'm at the point, that I think the current game can be polished from graphics and sound perspective, but it's definitely replay-able, and fun and I can't wait to introduce new ideas for spices and the mini games that I've written down since I've started working on the second minigame (which was Hide'N'Seek).

I'm currently trying to learn how to market the game to reach people who might be interested, which is quite exhausting, but I'm pretty sure once it reaches the right audience and gather feedback to avoid feature creep by implementing a lot of games, to later be reworked because it doesn't fit the audience, I'll get the motivation to continue with the marketing AND the development in parallel.

There are a lot of things I haven't covered, like getting my application on steam, developing the sound and music for the game, and testing the game. Be sure to reach out here or on discord if you are interested in further topics or if you have questions.

The game is currently in a demo state here, and on steam, and will be available in early access on steam once I have the confidence of the player base that the game is on the right track.