Concept 3 - Playable Stickfigure Flash Animation

Fast-paced 2D beat-’em-up simulating old stick figure flash animations where you mow down hordes of enemies as you fight through a mysterious facility, with health only being gained and maintained through stylish play.

Core Loop: Move into an area, fight hordes of enemies as stylishly as possible, move through to the next area (perhaps avoiding traps), perhaps use points gained from handling fights well to purchase weapons or other bonuses, fight an extra-tough boss, repeat with next level.

Similar Games:

- One Finger Death Punch: Similar style and flow, and very similar aesthetic, but with more complex gameplay and more focus on movement and positioning.

- ULTRAKILL: Similar focus on rewarding stylish and aggressive gameplay, but completely different gameplay style as a 2D beat-'em-up rather than an FPS game. 

- Streets of Rage: Similar rough mechanical outline as a beat-'em-up where you fight through waves of enemies as you advance through a level, but purely 2D and much faster-paced with much weaker enemies.

Prototyping Plan: The hook here is admittedly a bit more aesthetic, being a bit more of a “power fantasy” than a traditional beat-‘em-up, emphasizing fast-paced, slick movement to mimic the feel of old Flash animations, making enemies quick and easy to defeat but punishing if you do mess up - luckily the art style is simplistic, so sketches should suffice, and a fairly simple string of encounters mixed with obstacles should be more than enough to experiment with a basic combat system and all kinds of juice and effects to maximize the satisfaction gained from hitting an opponent, to see whether this kind of fast-paced combat is entertaining or just mindless (or worse, frustrating).

Challenges:

• VERY reliant on aesthetic and game feel, meaning difficult to prototype
• I don’t play many beat-’em-ups, so the genre’s best practices are unknowns
• A lot of the balancing has to come down to hitboxes
• Honestly not the most immediately obviously unique
• Needs surprisingly sophisticated enemy AI to prevent the player from just getting overwhelmed
• The animations required will be a headache