Tads. is a fighting game in which you play a small tadpole bumping its opponent into a hostile and ever-changing environment!
Tads. was made by a team of 9 students in 1 month, during our studies at ENJMIN. The team included a producer, an audio designer, 2 visual artists, a UI/UR specialist, 2 programmers and 2 game designers (including me).
Concept from playwrights Bertolt Brecht (in A Short Organum for the Theatre)
Players relation to their avatar is not a relation of embodiment or attachment
Players are rather curious and considered about an avatar stranger to them
Players avatars are projectiles. They bounce, they're not always controllable
Avatars can be goaled (like in football)
Controlling something else
To create the distancing effect, we choose a very unusual way to control the avatars speed. Players have to turn their right joystick as if it was a crank handle. Turning it clockwise makes the tad accelerate, and counter-clockwise makes it decelerate.
Another tool to build the distancing effect was the screen layout. The gameplay area is completely separated from the UI area. From a player perspective, its like they are looking at the game space through some kind of exterior tool (a microscope for instance).
Level design : the world doesnt care
For combat, the arena features normal and deadly walls. The later are indicated with red colors.
To make players feel the world around them is hostile, we also make the arena evolve between each round. The evolution is random, making it unpredictable. Like if the world had its own agency.
Tadpole combat
Combat was designed with a few features :
To feel the vulnerability of the tad, it dies instantly on contact with a deadly object.
On collisions with anything, tads are bounced according to their relative speed and directions. A PvP collision stuns both tads (controls disabled) for a very short time frame.
Tad speed is instantly set much higher, and its steering is limited. Then back to normal.
In order to kill, one has to bounce the opposing tadpole towards a deadly zone. To chain collisions into a killing collision, one has to bounce the other tadpole to a wall (extending its stun duration with the wall collision).
To allow players to bounce their opponent towards a wall, the arena is quite narrow vertically.
We also added a teleport action to enrich this combat :
The tad teleports to a location and its speed is set to zero.
Teleport is both an escape and set up tool. It allows to break free of a stun combo, or to surprise the opponent with a fast repositioning.
Finally, we also implemented an energy system. It limits the use of actions. This allows us to make the tads feel more fragile, and also prevents infinite stun combos to be performed.
Food energy makes replenishing energy not free (vulnerability), and creates a simple strategic issue.
Perform dashes and teleports costs energy from a gauge. This limits the use of actions.
In arena center, we spawn food tads have to eat to replenish their energy. Each tad has its own food type, but they spawn on a common condition. There is then a strategic advantage in managing the food respawn to ones advantage.
