Underground Robot Fights by Sabeurre

[raw]
made by Sabeurre for Ludum Dare 45 (JAM)

Hey guys!

We're So happy to show you this game tonight.

The UI was harder to integrate than we thought and we couldn't implement some feature but it was a lot of fun !

We hope you'll enjoy this as much as we enjoyed making it anyways.

Cheers from France! :cheese:

Team

Tools

  • Unity
  • Aseprite (pixel art software)
  • FLStudio (Digital Audio Workstation)
  • Figma (Wireframe, UI mockup design, and SVG editor)

Story (should have been in the game so added here instead)

You are a freshman from an engineer school, and, sadly, you have lost everything in business because you followed your best friend who wanted to make a video game studio.

You're now broke, and homeless. Even your friends and family have forsaken you because they were disapproving of you doing making video games for a living in the first place ("too risky" they said).

As you're looking for a nice bridge to sleep under, an unknown man approaches and makes an offer to you : he loans money to you so that you can live on, and you must engage in Underground Robot Fight in exchange (a business of his) until you pay it back.

You decide to take his offer. Will you succeed in paying your loan back ? Will you let your debt swallow you whole ? Or will you awaken to the Underground Robot Fight Beauty, and become the uncontested boss of the arena ?

How to play (or at least how it was meant to be played)

The game has two phases, a preparation phase and a fighting phase.

You win when you manage to pay back your loan.

To earn money, you can have your robot fight every night. The stronger the foe, the greater the reward.

Either you win or lose, if your robot is damaged, it is repaired the following day. This is not magic, this is engineering. (you can at least handle this much after studying this for 5 years I hope)

You pay interests everyday as long as you have ongoing loans. Generally, the higher the loans, the higher the interests amount.

You can spend your remaining fund on robot upgrade to win over tougher opponents, and earn more money.

You lose if you go bankrupt.

Fights explained

1570479622105.png

This is a one on one robot fight with a turn-based combat system. Your robot is always on the left hand side.

You can choose one of 3 attack types :

  • Attack : Your robot performs a physical attack, effective against Projectile
  • Guard : Your robot attempts to parry and counter incoming attack, effective against Attack
  • Projectile : Your robot performs a ranged attack, effective against Guard

Both robot strike at the same time when you press either of three attack button.

You win if your oponent's health reaches 0.

You lose if your robot's health reaches 0.

PRO TIPS

  1. enemy attacks are not random. Each enemy generally have a preference for a certain attack type. Stay alert ! (we all have our favorite attack in such games don't we ?)
  2. Each attack type deals more damage when your opponent perform a certain other attack type. be sure to check health bars when blows are exchanged.
  3. On the right side of the screen, an attack type icon is displayed next to a percentage range. This is the probability for your oponent to perform an attack of the shown type (SKL on the screenshot above). The range will get more precise as your OBS stat increases.

Preparation phase

During this phase, you can

  • pay back your loan (and win if you pay back everything)
  • upgrade your robot or your character

Money

1570479032178.png

In this panel, you can check how much you have left to pay, and info about each of the loans you have taken.

Yes, you are already broke AND indebted with one loan, and you can borrow more money if you need.

The fights will get tougher as you days pass so you'll probably need to resort to this to overcome stronger enemies. Be careful though as your daily payments will increase too. Don't go bankrupt!

Robot upgrades

1570479063703.png

Here, you can buy upgrades to make your robot stronger.

DMG increases the damage dealt by all three attack types. DEF decreases the damage you take. SKL makes effective attack types even stronger and reduces the damage taken when your opponent hits you with an effective attack. There are also special upgrade you can unlock later which effects are described on the Interface.

Oh, and you can also check out your robot's stats on the right side!

Character upgrades

1570479202708.png

Buy assets for yourself!

There's only one upgrade on this screenshot but there might be more when the game is actually released.

OBS stands for Observation and increases your odds to see through your oponent's next move during a fight!

Click the "you" tab to check your character's stats.

PRO TIPS

Your reputation will have an effect on the loans you can take. Higher reputation means better deals!

*Edit after release : *

I have written the how to play section with hope everything would be ok but sadly we couldn't fix all bugs in time. It is actually playable but the game never really ends as the win screen doesn't trigger when you pay back all your loans. If you do reach this stage, consider you have won :smile: If your money balanced gets in the negative, you're supposed to have lost. Also, be gentle with the UI (don't click too fast) as some other unexpected behavior might occur...

Hope you'll be able to enjoy this anyways :smile:

Ratings

Overall 497th 3.518⭐ 30🧑‍⚖️
Fun 455th 3.397⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 531th 3.207⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Theme 615th 3.241⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 513th 3.586⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Audio 281th 3.537⭐ 29🧑‍⚖️
Mood 356th 3.596⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Given 24🗳️ 35🗨️

Feedback

JD Parker
07. Oct 2019 · 23:32 UTC
I love battle bots, custom robo, and pokemom so I really enjoyed this game!
Ostrich
07. Oct 2019 · 23:34 UTC
Those robot sprites look great!
krjack
08. Oct 2019 · 00:31 UTC
Great game, lots of content, and nice graphics!
4quet
08. Oct 2019 · 09:31 UTC
Wow you must have put so much work in that upgrades system and UI !
The graphics are beautiful, great work :)
🎤 Sabeurre
08. Oct 2019 · 09:47 UTC
@4quet : Thank you ! Yeah, too much work. There is so much that we couldn't put in it because of the lack of time (or organisation :smile: )

@jd-parker @ostrich @krjack : Thank you all :D
Kenarf
08. Oct 2019 · 11:36 UTC
Great execution on this idea! Really enjoyed it. Bravo!
maliyshock
08. Oct 2019 · 11:49 UTC
Sorry, I could not play well, cause i have mac, and i could play with web version only. And yellow buttons are barely visible on white background. So it was difficult to understand whats going on and I could not play well.

At the same time our game does not have any other builds at all, except windows XD
Chocolat-Endive
08. Oct 2019 · 11:55 UTC
I really like it! Good job on the UI, updates, and generating enemies!
More musics could have been cool.
Caberu
08. Oct 2019 · 17:53 UTC
The music is realy funny and the UI is well thought! Good job!
Avzgui
08. Oct 2019 · 20:25 UTC
A really impressive job, especially the UI and graphics. Musics are also quite cool (battle music is, may be, a little bit too high in comparison with menu music)
mmason
09. Oct 2019 · 01:48 UTC
Some games you play for 5 minutes, others are like this. Nice music, good progression and challenging even at the end
WhoMakeWorse
09. Oct 2019 · 13:45 UTC
Good game, lot of features. Thanks for the pro tips;) :v:
I played a lot.
Congratulations
Xakkar
09. Oct 2019 · 13:53 UTC
Cool robot fighting)
Manomeu
09. Oct 2019 · 22:33 UTC
OMG! I play this game for 1 hour, Nice game.![RobotGame.png](///raw/c33/82/z/293c5.png)DAY 318
Hmaya
10. Oct 2019 · 07:52 UTC
Congrats ! You're the boss of the arena @manomeu !
Happy you enjoyed it :)
Space Nomad
11. Oct 2019 · 15:05 UTC
very nice idea and a lot of work done. how ever sadly there are way too many bugs. the "you win/you lose" screen appears before either robot runs out of health for example. there's bugs with money, robots appearing in the middle of arena instead of edge, etc
and that really ruins the fun sadly :c
still, i liked it a lot and hope you'll release later patches with less bugs!
DjindeGames
17. Oct 2019 · 12:07 UTC
Don't know about the others but I didn't encountered many bugs, it doesn't ruin the experience at all. Nice entry, maybe a bit too ambitious, but a lot of work has already been done and the game is pretty cool!
Keithdae
24. Oct 2019 · 14:55 UTC
@djindegames Thanks for the comment, we were definitely too ambitious and ran out of time to properly test or implement everything. Many issues are specific to things like screen resolution (ultrawide simply doesn't work at all), tutorial button doesn't work on fullscreen, etc

Other bugs are only visual, like the health bars not updating on the last hit of the fight (but the hit does work properly).