Deep Dive
Baby Bubble Battle is a 2-player fighting and party game where both players face off against each other, trying to push the other out of the arena.
They have access to jumps or ground-pounds for accelerated fall; but the bouncy physics, stun-inducing beer and THE TRAIN are real dangers to be wary of!
After each round, the game restarts with brand new randomized cosmetics combination for each Baby Bubble, making sure every new round is unique in some way.
It is a project realized in 48h for the Global Game Jam 2024, specifically the ArtFX edition of the GGJ, which included many bonus modifiers and challenges to add in our game.
“Make Me Laugh”
The theme for this Game Jam was “Make Me Laugh”, so after some brainstorming with many definitely normal ideas, we stopped on “A battle between two babies where you bounce around the arena to push your opponent away”.
The idea of a “Baby Bubble” came to balance out our lack of animators (and of time), as opposed to doing some ragdoll shenanigans. Some of the permanent movements in the background (the Train or spectator Fries) have been done with VATs by Ludovic.
The final look of the game, feat. THE Train.
In order to capitalize on the craziness of the base idea, and to include some ARTFX modifiers like “include french fries / beer / a French TER” in the game, we banked on a “crazy funny nonsense” idea. The game will be nonsense, but a funny nonsense!
This is how we arrived at the final “Baby Bubble Battle Tournament” idea:
One arena with a public of French Fries, beer thrown at us from the bleachers that can stun players, and a train that loops around the arena before shooting through the air and KOing any touched player.
To give more agency to the players, they can manually jump, stay on the ground to roll, ground-pound in mid-air to attack opponents; and most of the physics has been manually tweaked to make it both fun and fair at the same time.
“One Last Game!”
Quickly while playtesting the game, we noticed it was heavily addictive. Even with stuff to do and a time restriction, we found ourselves playing just another game, and another, and another…
We had to take advantage of this fact and added ways to make rounds more different AND shorter at the same time: The ground breaks down progressively faster and faster, there’s a point system to encourage playing again, you can survive the train on rare occasion through sheer luck of lenient launching angles (rare events bring hype), and the most important factor:
Every Baby is randomly customized at the start of each round. With a big starting sequence to clearly show who’s who, and add laughter potentials.
The introduction sequence at the start. Exactly 4,320 different cosmetic combinations are possible.