Hip n Hopping Invader

Hey guys! It been a while, huh? I was pretty busy because I joined a game jam! Specifically, the April Fighting Game Jam. The deadline ended couple days ago so I figured to share the fruit of our labor. I teamed up with a bunch of guys who worked on some cool flash games in the past, such as Bearus and even Cartoon Network's Jump Joust Jam. I was very lucky being able to team up with people who got plenty of experience underneath their belt.

I mainly served as art director, character designer and clean up animator! (I edited that trailer up there too, as well lol)

(Animation roughs provided by Pencilwing, clean up done by myself. We only had time to polished these characters up, rest are still in their roughs)

We worked very hard to make a polished build for this game jam, so I hope people can try it out, enjoy it and let us know what you think! We've been thinking about working on it some more after the jam is over. Maybe release it on other platforms? Who knows! At the very least, we're gonna take it easy for this week, lol.

I'll also be sharing some of the work I done for this game throughout the month, so be on the look out for that! I'll also be posting stuff over on my BlueSky (I recommend following this if you want to see stuff from me early!)

To cap this post off, I wanna thank for my teammates for their support

Thanks to Rodrigo for not only programming this entire thing by himself and leading the project, but also for taking a chance on me. It means a lot to me to have that kind of support

Thanks to Pencilwing for providing the roughs on the animation and other VFX work. I don't think the game would look as good without his additional support

A LOT has happened since the initial game jam release!

First thing first, our game showed up at Combo Breaker's Mystery Game's Tournament last month! If you don't know, Combo Breaker is one of the bigger fighting game events. Every year, they like to host a "Mystery Bracket" where the catch is that all competitors don't know what games they're going to be playing, Doesn't have to specifically be fighting games either, just any game with a competitive mode. It's very entertaining from a casual perspective.

But yeah, to our surprised, Pump Punks was one of the games! Rod, our programmer, detailed it more over on the itch page. It was very surreal to see how much reach our game had, especially something made for a game jam. Thanks to the organizers for including our game! I know for sure, I will not forgot the audience chanting "Bop that punk" during the final match lol.

Besides that, the game jam's judging period ended earlier this month and we hit the number one ranking in best presentation!

We also got the top 4 spots in the other categories as well. Thanks for Andrea and the FGC dev discord community for hosting this jam! Here's a link to the jam itself so you can check out the other games that were made during this. Bunch of cool stuff there! Honestly, I should've shout out the organizers in the last blog, but it completely slipped my mind. Sorry about that! Without the game jam existing in the first place, Pump Punks wouldn't have been a thing so I'm deeply appreciative for all the effort they put into running this event.

Moving onto the game itself, the trailer up there and the patch notes detail what's up but basically this is a more polished version of the original game jam build. A big thing is finally finishing up the last two characters, Pom and Frevo!

(Left are the animation roughs provided by Pencilwing, clean up done by myself)

With that, all the game's visuals in its current version are now consistent! Initially this was supposed to be part of a larger update, but we figured to release a smaller one over to hold people over since the original build had some issues that needed to be fixed. We couldn't update the game last month since it was a month-long judging period, so that's why it took a while (that and we needed to take a break from the amount of work done within one month, lol).

We might push out some smaller updates but our big plan is to put this up on Newgrounds later this year. It might take a bit due to various factors, however. Mostly now that the game jam is over, couple of us who worked on this game are taking more of a lax approach since we don't have to worry about a deadline anymore. The game was mostly an excuse to challenge ourselves for a lot of people. Just kind of hard to put more time into it when it's currently a completely free project, but it's still slowly being worked on!

Personally, I also want to revamp some things about the game and give it a stronger showcase on the website. I'm sorta viewing the Newgrounds release as a test to see if Pump Punks got any legs or if we should leave it as is once we finish the initial NG build.

During the Game Jam run, we got a bunch of comments saying something along the lines of "This should be up on steam!" "I would so buy this if this was on sale!" "You guys should work on it some more!". I do agree with some of these points and I can see a potential future where we take this game further, but it's also tough to justify jumping head first when we lack the money and resources to do. Especially so when it's a casual fighting game, which has a limited reach.

There are some avenues we can take, mind you, but we figured it's best to see how the game fares on a website like Newgrounds first before taking that risk. Otherwise, maybe we do put all that effort only for the game to bomb and we end up in debt, you never know! The game industry is just challenging like that! Hope that's understandable.

So if this is the last edition of the game, I do want to give it my all within the limited time we got currently and make something great for everyone.

Updates regarding Pump Punks will probably be quieter since I want to keep some things as a surprise, but hopefully you'll hear about some stuff sooner than later! We do have a discord for the game where we share some exclusive info on there too. You can access it either through the game or on the itch page. For safety reasons, I'm not going to be posting a link to it on this blog post, lol.

We only had time to properly finished two out of the four characters for the game jam, hence why Pom and Frevo aren't part of this post. We're planning on doing a polish update later in the year, so they're being worked on as we speak.