Punch It!

Punch It! is a multiplayer racing game where you race between checkpoints at high speeds. The turns are sharp, too sharp for your ultra-fast vehicle to turn at, forcing you to break at the right times in order to minimize downtime and keep moving. Featuring online multiplayer for up to four players, you can race by yourself or compete with your friends for the fastest times. In multiplayer, you can use boosts to kill unsuspecting players, setting them back to the last checkpoint.

CONTROLS

W - Accelerate

AD - Turn left and right

Space - Brake

LShift - Boost

Credits

Austin - Producer and Player Control

Amelia - 3D Animation and Particle Effects

Jacob - Level Design and Shaders

Diego - Scene Management

Ke Ding - Sound Design

Post-Mortem:

Communication

This was the third biggest issue during development. The discord was always on point and everybody was quick to respond, but Unity Collab’s free version would only allow for three people on the project at a time. This meant that the other two team members had to work from the outside. While they were able to completely design all three of the menu scenes from the outside it was difficult to demonstrate their hard work from outside the game.

Multiplayer Comprehension

This was the second biggest issue during development. None of us had ever made a proper multiplayer game before, so it took until the end to get the players to kill each other properly. That means that much of the movement had to be based off of drifting into a retrograde rather than trying to stretch out brakes since health never had time to get implemented. 

If the game had more time to cook we might have experimented with incrementing the nitrous force the longer the player had held brake for. We also wanted to experiment with a circular race track even if it were antithetical to the initial design. Even if it were bad; it would communicate the project idea.

Minimalism vs Marketability

This was the single biggest issue during development; communicating the selling point to the player. While F-Zero was a big inspiration, the game is very different from any existing racing game. The fun part is slowing down. During our first check in we were told to improve the level design, but the design was largely linked to the straightaway. Something like a clover or hourglass would drastically decrease the amount of potential collisions. In the end we kept the straightaway for multiplayer and settled on a square shape for singleplayer.

Selgrad’s note was on game design, but the real issue was aesthetic. The straight-away appears lazy. Even if the player was dealing with intense gameplay; the simple map would subconsciously prevent them from counter-play. The straightaway was given more intense music and the next map was designed to be more hellish to distract the player from the minimalism.