Paper Match
A game completely made from scratch during my internship at Embedded Fitness in Fall of 2024.
All visuals, particles, music and sound effects were made by me during my internship.
Unfortunately, you can only play the game if you rent the Smart Dance Hardware from the company.
I will show as much behind-the-scenes progress as possible on this page. This provides good insight on my game design progress in practice.
To the right you can see the main menu of the game, at 00:31 the game is started and you can see gameplay.
Design Challenge
The input for the game only supported 4 buttons based on the Smart Dance System. It is basically just a Dance Dance Revolution pad.
What sets apart the Smart Dance System is its ability to wirelessly connect up to 32 pads to any computer.
The objective of my assignment was to design a 16-player game locally on a stand-alone screen.
One of the requirements for the game was that it had to run on an integrated graphics chip.
This meant that the models had to be of low poly count. For the textures, the transparency and texture size had to be kept to a minimum.
To the left you can see the amazingly powerful hardware the company provided.
Research and Concept Art
My internship company wanted a new leisure game for their Smart Dance System. So they hired me for this challenge.
Now, you can not make a game without an idea, so I brainstormed and settled upon a 16-player party game much like Fall Guys.
When this idea was greenlit, I started sketching ideas for the game.
Here is what these sketches looked like.
Prototyping
In my game design process, I like to start prototyping right after ideation.
Firstly, I benchmarked the hardware by loading a heavy Unity scene to get an idea of what the integrated graphics could handle.
Then based on the tests I decided on polycounts and texture resolutions.
During prototyping for the game I focussed on stability and collission quality.
I played around with the idea of the level being pushed (off the imaginary table) as it changed to the next. This whole idea was changed later on.
If you have a keen eye, then by now you might have seen that I love using VALVe's Source Engine development textures. As seen in cp_orange.
Hazards
A 16-player local obstacle course party game would be too easy without hazards. Already from the start there was the hazard of falling out of the map.
Giving the players lives or health in a game where movement is physics-based and unpredictable simply is not fun.
So I designed it that when a player falls out of the map, they always respawn. However, it will reset them at the start of the current level each time.
Hostile Toy Robots
In combination with hazards I introduced an enemy AI. To fit in with the papercraft/toy theme, I made the enemy a toy robot.
The robots attack using a pop-out boxing glove. It is silly when multiple robots target a lone player, as it looks like they are just ganging up on them.
In the game you can actually see the threads of the robot roll when they move. This is done using an UV transform in Unity.
Below you can see the mood board and concept art for the robots, as well as the animations and final model in game.
The Problematic Player Design Process
The hardest thing to get right was readability of the characters. There are 16 of them, and they need to be recognisable among the chaos of the game.
It does not really help much that the camera is so far away from the action, thats why I exaggerated the size of their accessories.
All characters use the same base model for balanced physics-based gameplay. The primary variation is created with colours, accessories and their eyes.
The colours of the characters were especially a tough choice. If children were to play the game I want them to be able to say: "I want to be red! Who is playing green? Where did blue go?"
As part of research, I decided to try building a papercraft of the goat player character in real life. I never got around to glueing it together because I was working on the game.
To get this right I went through many iterations of design as seen below.
The Level Deconstruction Scissors
At first there was a boring laser that just evaporated the level. To make it more realistic, I decided to implement a powerful pair of scissors.
To make the players fear the scissors even more, I made it so that players get snipped into bits when they get hit.
Out of playtests, it turned out to be a lot of fun to run from the scissors as the level collapsed behind the players.
Custom Made Particles
All particles in the game were made by me using the default Unity particle system. And based on my prior experience working with particles in Unity.
It is surprising how far you can come using only the default particle system in Unity if you know what you are doing.
