New Main Menu

So far I have received very promising feedback from 5 testers, I've made my planning for the upcoming week.

To balance the game more nicely, and to not receive so many shields so fast, I'll add a Drop Rate Mechanic to the Random Item Mechanic. This has been a point made, where getting a lot of Fake Item Generators is not too fun.

The AI is also too busy "making out" from time to time, and dealing with that is going to be a bit of a hassle but not impossible at least! :)

Anyway, to give my head a fresh take on different aspects of the game, I decided to rework the visuals of the Main Menu.

I wanted to keep a motif throughout the game. I came up with a very nice motif for Mayhem Arena, which also reoccurs in Lunatinc's logo :)

I then took this shape, and try to visualise an image to what the players are welcomed in the Main Menu.

I sketched this design:

I really like how this turned out. It looks like the Singleplayer button and the Multiplayer button look like they can fit into one another, so that gave me an idea for something later as well. :)

First off, the Singleplayer button.

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I really like the look of this button. I also received some nice feedback on these buttons on a personal level, saying that the use of this motif is really nice.

The same feedback was made over the Multiplayer button.

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The ones that I showed these buttons could already make out which button is for single player, and which one for multiplayer. It is very simple really, as I can expect that you would have guessed without me already saying what it was. :P

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Yeah. This is the Exit button! Good guess :)

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I really like how these turned out. I'm not too handy with Illustrator and Photoshop, but I do have some general knowledge. Plus, YouTube is a great source of tutorials :)

This button here is the new Settings button.

If you have ever made a widget in Unreal Engine, you'd probably wondering how this will look when I add this to a normal button. I actually came across something called the Ovodus Button, which was made into a plugin for Unreal. This button takes in a texture which it uses to see if the mouse is overlapping the image or not. Meaning, for example, if the mouse hovered over the motif-hole in the Settings button and then clicked, it wouldn't register. Very neat!

Now to test it.

It looks nicely in here.

I've anchored all the buttons in the middle of the screen. This is for what I have planned with this part of the menu.

This is what I have made so far. The background is of course up for a lot more than this. Also, the cubes do have a purpose! They were just put there so I can see how the depth is affected by all the menu transitions.

Lastly, the menu animation.

That's all to share for now!

Mayhem Arena Pre-Alpha build

Hello everyone!

I built the current version of Mayhem Arena for you to playtest!

I added a word document to the .zip file with the controls, but you can find them down in this post as well.

Download the most recent Mayhem Arena here!

You need to have a Dropbox account to download the game.

Whilst you're reading this, you can now subscribe to my blog to receive a notification when I make a new post! Just click on the subscribe button on the right. :)

After you've played the game, please fill in my Feedback Form that is linked here. It will help me out greatly in developing Mayhem Arena further! 

Have fun!

How to start play testing
When you have downloaded the files from Dropbox:

1. Drag and drop the downloaded .zip folder to any desired destination. (I recommend the desktop for easy use).
2. Extract the contents.
3. Click on the newly extracted folder, and open the next folder which is also called Mayhem Arena.
4. Click on the .exe file.
5. Wait for the game to load.
6. Click on Singleplayer.
7. Click on the arrows to select a character and character colour.
8. Click Continue
9. You can now choose the stage, the amount of AI characters and the amount of lives everyone has.
10. Have a blast blasting AI!

The Controls

Action	Keyboard & Mouse
Shooting	Left Mouse Click
Aiming	Right Mouse Click
Walking	W,A,S,D
Jumping	Spacebar
Throw Away Item	X
Pause Game	Esc, P
Mayhem Mode	Alt
Punch Recover	Shift Ctrl

Mayhem Arena: Concept explained

Hello everyone!

I'm just going to quickly summarise what Mayhem Arena is all about.

Mayhem Arena is a Battle Royale Arena Brawler where you fight with items and their unique behaviours to throw off the opponents. Like Super Smash Brothers, you have a damage percentage, and the higher the damage taken, the further you'll fly away.

Two heavy inspiring games are the already mentioned Super Smash Brothers series, and Rayman M/Arena. I used to play those games quite a lot when growing up, and I wanted to both pay homage and create a game that includes what I 'missed' in those games.

Right, so developing this game has been quite a challenge. I needed to add AI characters and have them behave in the same way as you would expect with other players. The complexity in these AI characters is something I am really proud of, since they constantly make the same decisions as players will given the scenario.

A more in depth mechanic is the Item System. It has several mechanics working together, which result in giving players random items each time, just like in Rayman M/Arena, and with that the players will need to figure out a cunning plan to attack.

In Mayhem Arena, each character is able to go Mayhem, which is built up by taking damage, damaging others and some items give a select amount of Mayhem experience. The Mayhem Level decides, once you go Mayhem, how strong your temporary buff is. You can go all the way up to Level 7, and each level will give a greater boost than the previous level. You will run faster, do more damage, take less damage, and your item's abilities are also affected by your Mayhem Level.

Mayhem Arena has gone through quite some changes over the year:

 These are pictures taken from the very beginning. For debugging purposes I added the damage on top of each player, and the Mayhem Meter, which indicates what Mayhem Level and the experience you've got.

The ball on the screen is the early Homing Bullet, which the name suggest, will chase your opponents and will explode and launch them on hit! :)

 I managed to knock someone down the hole in the middle. This means that they will lose one life. Once all their lives have been depleted, they're out. If not, they'll respawn on the map after a short time.

The square in this picture is the early Item Generator. This thing will give you a random item when walked over it. It is up to you how to use it!

 This is the first iteration of the battle stage selector. You can easily set the stage, the amount of AI you're fighting (with a maximum of 7, since there can only be 8 at max) and the lives that every one has.

 These are pictures taken on a different battle stage. This stage has more holes in it, and it is considerably smaller. I made three differently sized stages just to gauge which size would be generally the nicest to play on. So far, the first stage seems to be the best, but with all the planned changes in the future, that could change.

In the early days, the explosions would send anyone flying in an odd strange line. For debugging, it did work.
Later, this was changed to a favourite and luckily in-build mechanic: RAGDOLL!
Now anyone blasted will flop around the screen helplessly. This really does bring a very comedic effect. :)

These are the current stages I've made. These won't be available in the release of Mayhem Arena, since they're just here for tweaking and debugging.

On this thread of tweets, you can find more pictures of Mayhem Arena over the past year!

pic.twitter.com/0lA4p0zy62

— Lunatinc (@_Lunatinc) July 21, 2018

In my previous entry, I've added a video which shows the game play of Mayhem Arena back then.
Right now, I'm overhauling some mechanics to work smoother, for instance the aiming mechanic.

I hope you enjoyed reading up, I'll see you in the next update!

Joris

Welcome to Mayhem Arena

Welcome to the first blog of Mayhem Arena. I started developing this game since April 2018. Mayhem Arena started of as a college assignment, which I later took on to develop more since I received a lot of good feedback and I really enjoyed seeing this game take form.

Over the last year, I've been studying on a lot of topics and took on a couple online courses to gain more knowledge to deal with the many issues I've had with developing this game. I even took off a couple months of developing to focus on my studies.

My fiancee, Emma, has helped me with developing by giving live feedback on changes that I made with each day. She even voiced a character for in game use (even though the current speech files were for testing purposes, they'll be redone once the game is closer to a finish).

Anyway, if you want to have a general idea of what the gameplay currently looks like, I've recorded one test video to test mechanics, which you can see in this video:

To give a small overlook on all the planned assets, this is what I will implement and add to the game:

• Multiplayer with Steam support
• Singleplayer
• Characters models
• Speech for characters
• Updating UI
• Updating controls and movement

This game is expected to be released on Steam around mid 2019!

I hope you are all just as, if not more, excited as I am for this game. I really hope to hearing from you! 😃

Sincerely,

Joris 👊