Mocho vs Mostros is a one screen first person beat'em up where you have only one arm to eliminate your enemies one by one.

We came with the idea after brainstorming about the theme of the GMTK Game Jam 2019: Only One. The ideas? Here they are:

• Only one tool: a 2D platformer similar to the mechanic used in Super Mario Sunshine with the F.L.U.D.D. You have to move and attack using the same tool.
• Suicide Club: a multiplayer 2D platformer game which could be played by only one person at a time, trying to simulate a real arcade machine. The levels are designed to be impossible to complete at the beginning, but every dead character will remain in the game and become part of the scenario, its sacrifice will be used to pass different pitfalls and traps. So at the end is a collaborative game where every person's death will help the future players to win the game.
• Faulty Robot: a Where is Waldo-like  game where you work as a QA scientist inside a big robot factory. Your work is to run a variety of fun tests on a batch of 100 robots to find out the only one that is defective.
• Maimed Boxing: a boxing game like Punch Out, but with only one arm.
• Rhythmic endless-runner: a rhythmic endless-runner using only one button.
• Saitamas Fighting: a regular 2D fighting game but the fighters KO with only one punch (like Saitama, from One punch man).
• 4 room puzzle: an escape room where 4 different characters are visible in 4 different rooms, they are all interconnected but you will be forced to save only one and kill the others by solving the puzzle.

We had our favorites, but we learnt with our last jam game "Cabron en Transmilenio" that it is better to make the game we love the most and we could achieve successfully during the jam duration. Maimed Boxing won, so we started to think about different gameplay mechanics and it's plot.

Mocho vs Mostros

We came with the idea of a badass action hero Rambo-Saitama-like with the ability of killing any enemy with only one punch: Mocho ("mocho" is an expression used in Colombia to describe a maimed person). 

He has saved the world many times and in this adventure he must destroy alien invaders from outer space. We called them Mostros (is a common bad spelling of "monstruos", the Spanish translation for Monsters).

To beat as much Mostros as possible we imagine gameplay similar to Punch Out but using a first-person perspective like Doom, enemy after enemy will spawn and try to fight you until you defeat them all or die trying.

We started working with only one thing in mind: to have the very basic mechanic of killing a monster with one punch ready. Once that was done, we decided to make the enemies attacks on a rhythm-based pattern (we implemented a metronome following the bpm of the music for that). As we started to kill 'em all we discovered that actually implementing some fighting game mechanics like parry and cancel frame would be great to make it more rewarding. At some point killing enemies became too easy, se we decided that we needed to make the Mostros avoid the attacks from the player, the only way to kill them now is to caught them off-guard.

Killing Movements:

There are four ways to kill the Mostros:

• Attacking them in the anticipation frame: all Mostros have an anticipation frame to prepare, you can hit them before they attack.

• A counter-attack by parry: press the block button (D) at the very beginning of the anticipation frame and Mocho will perform a parry with an automatic counter-attack (It will restore some health and stamina too!).

• Hit them after they recover from dodge: Mostros avoid most of the attacks, so you can hit to make them dodge and then kill them when they are returning to their position. This consumes stamina though, so the best way to achieve this movement is by canceling the attack. If the player cancels the attack, it recovers the stamina spent on the hit without completing it. Mostros that fall in the trap will be vulnerable after the dodge.

• Attacking them on the vulnerable frames: all Mostros have a vulnerable frame in which they are not aware of the attacks and can't dodge, you can identify those frames by looking at their eyes, their pupils will change.

Enemies

We created 3 different types of Mostros to encourage players to use different techniques to kill them.

• Alonso - the grunt: is our base Mostro. He attacks in a pretty predictable way and makes small damage.

• Milton - the fast: a pretty difficult Mostro to kill with parry or anticipation, he has the most evident vulnerability frames.

• Marta - the cursed: a strategic Mostro that consumes your stamina with poisonous gas and then attacks. She needs to be killed as fast as possible.

Balancing

The idea of using stamina came later as a way of preventing players to rush punching madly, every hit consumes a 20% of the total stamina, and Marta drains stamina with her special attack. To recover stamina players need to kill enemies, a regular kill recovers 18%, a parry kill recovers 30%, and just waiting recover 1% per beat.

We spent a good amount of time tuning the patterns, timeouts and stats for Mocho and the Mostros, but it can always be improved.

We have more ideas to continue with this game development like including a global leaderboard, increasing the beat of the music and the speed of Mostros with the player progress, including different challenges such as: perfect combos, use parry only and use regular punch only.

That's it! thank you so much for reading this! we had a very good time making this game, we are glad to receive any feedback or comment, so don't be hesitate :D!

Ps: all the game code is hosted on github. We built Mocho vs Mostros with Godot 3.1 <3 

Ps: we are using 💪 to refer to mocho and to the game itself. ;-)