Burpucers! is a local multiplayer party game in which you and your friends have control over a number of drunk characters overdrinking in a bar. I created this game concept during a game jam I participated in, alone. The theme of the game jam was the word "Produce".
You can choose what to drink and then you must produce burps to lower the effect of the drinks and maintain the balance of your character (so that the drunk guy doesn't smash the ground!). You will earn points as long as you can keep your character on his feet.
What you choose to drink, on the other hand, can make a big difference. There are a few drinks with different intensities (aka different alcohol percentages) which you can choose from. The more intense the drink is, the harder it would be to keep balance, and the faster you would earn points by keeping your character on his feet (and vice versa). Whoever earns the most points at the end, wins the game.
Gameplay
At first, you would have to choose the number of players. Up to four players can play the game. Each player has their own character and should try to beat other players’ scores and get the highest score possible. The game continues until all the players’ characters fall down and lose the game eventually.
Core Loop
All of the players start the game at the same time. The game starts off with all characters drinking beverages. As soon as your character drinks, the challenge begins. He starts to totter and loses balance more and more until falling down to the ground. If your character falls down, you would lose the game. In order to prevent that from happening, you must make your character burp! You can do that by pressing the "burp" button repeatedly. If you manage to keep pressing the button fast enough, you can keep your character on his feet and continue playing the game.
Beverage Intensities
There are three different beverages with different intensities: weak, medium, and strong. Your character has already started by drinking from the weak beverage, and from that point on, you should choose which beverage you want to drink. If you choose to drink the weak beverage again, it would be not much of a challenge for you to keep your character on his feet (since you wouldn't have to press the button too fast), but on the downside, you would earn fewer points. Accordingly, if you choose to drink the medium or strong beverage, it would be more difficult for you to keep your character on his feet (since you would have to press the button faster and faster), and of course, you would earn much more points (More detail on this in the “Mechanics” section).
Beverage Cooldowns
Each beverage has its own cooldown. The more intense the beverage, the longer its cooldown is. When you drink a beverage, you can't drink the same beverage again before its cooldown resets. For example, if the medium beverage has a cooldown of x seconds and you drink from the medium beverage, you can't drink from it again before x seconds. Of course, you can drink from another beverage in that period (for example weak or strong), but that would multiply the effects of beverages, making the game harder by forcing you to press the button even faster, and increasing the amount of earned points at the same time! However, this wouldn’t make the first beverage go on cooldown again (More detail on this in the "Mechanics" section).
Beverage Score Multipliers
Each beverage also has its own score multiplier. A score multiplier indicates how fast you earn points. When you start the game, your score multiplier is 1, meaning you're earning points at the lowest rate possible. By choosing each beverage to drink, you swap its score multiplier with the one you already have. For example, if the medium beverage has a score multiplier of X, you would earn points at the rate of X after drinking it. If you drink another beverage with the score multiplier of Y after that (and not immediately after), you would earn points at the rate of Y, and not X*Y! This would only happen if you drink a beverage before the cooldown of another one resets (More detail on this in the "Earning Points" section). The weak beverage has the lowest score multiplier, and the strong beverage has the highest.
Earning Points
You start earning points as soon as the game starts. Earning continues as long as you keep pressing the "burp" button fast enough and by doing so, you keep your drunk guy on his feet. At the end of the game, the player who has earned more points is the winner. Notice that "more points" doesn't necessarily mean "more time" here, since the game isn't a "last man standing" mode as one can keep playing for long periods without earning many points. For this purpose, some elements can affect "how fast" you can earn points, as well as a QTE mechanic that is explained further in this section.
Your points have a score multiplier, which indicates how fast you earn them. You have already learned how the score multipliers of different beverages can affect this in the previous section. Here you'll see how different situations with drinking beverages, affects the score multiplier.
If you drink a beverage and then immediately drink another beverage before the cooldown of the first one resets, that would multiply the two multipliers and the result would be your score multiplier! If you go even further and drink the third (and last) beverage (before the cooldowns of the two other ones reset), your score multiplier would multiply by the third number and you would have the biggest score multiplier possible, only to make the game insanely difficult! If you stop drinking another beverage, however, after a short time your score multiplier would eventually decrease to that of the last beverage you've drunk. In that sense, you could say that bigger score multipliers mean a more difficult game, but at the same time, more points as well! So it's always a choice and trade that you have to make over and over again.
To make the gameplay more varied and challenging, there will be QTEs (Quick Time Events) in the process of earning points. There are periodic milestones in points and when you reach one, the gameplay mode would change for a few moments and a QTE would start. The QTE is about a spectrum, which has a "sweet spot" in between, and a "moving indicator" that moves left and right inside it at a certain speed. You would have to press the "burp" button when the moving indicator is within the sweet spot to beat the challenge and be able to continue playing the game. If you succeed, you would earn a huge amount of points and the gameplay would return to its normal mode until you reach the next milestone. If you fail to do so on the other hand, your character would fall down and you would lose the game.
Mechanics
As explained before, each beverage has its own intensity. Intensity affects the difficulty of keeping the balance of your character after drinking a certain beverage. In other words, intensity indicates how fast you need to press the "burp button" to keep your character on his feet!
There's a bar above your character's head in the UI layer, which is constantly showing how close your character is to falling down. For that purpose, there's also a thin indicator on this bar that moves to the left and right. You could say in a sense that this indicator is always moving to the left and it's your constant pressing of the burp button that is pushing it to the right. However, if you can't keep pressing the button fast enough, this indicator would move all the way to the left (red area) and your character would fall down. In that matter, you should always try to keep the indicator in the safe zone (green or yellow area). When you drink a high-intensity beverage, the indicator starts pushing to the left more rapidly and you would need to push it to the right faster (aka press the button faster) as well!
Intensities could be multiplied by each other as well, just like score multipliers. If you drink a beverage and then immediately drink another one (before the cooldown of the first one resets), the indicator would go crazy and you would have a much harder time keeping your character on his feet!
When you drink a beverage, it goes on cooldown and you can't drink it again until it's ready again. However, if you drink another beverage while the first one is on cooldown, it wouldn't make the first beverage go on cooldown again. That means you could drink the first beverage again as soon as it's ready, while the second one could not be ready yet. In other words, cooldowns are independent of each other. This also applies to a situation with all three beverages.
User Interface
Since the game is a local multiplayer party game and the players’ actions are independent of each other, every player needs their own UI elements.
There are different elements that are necessary for making the UI for this game:
- Beverages and their properties
- A sign that shows the player how close they are to falling down
- Current score multiplier
- Points earned
Here, you can see a sample of the UI system for one player (which is also applicable to all the players at the same time):
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