Hey, this started as a quick speedbuild with Chetter's community on a prompt of Sports Game. I also wanted to start making some branded maps.
I thought it would be neat to do a Casey Jones TMNT hockey game.
I named it "goongala" because that's his battle cry... his version of "cowabunga".
Core Gameplay:
First pass was just to get some frozen sewer level so we could pretend to play hockey by using the (then new) shove item and pushing ninjas (instead of pucks) into pipes (goals).
Early Playtesting / Published versions
I made some changes early on to use different pipes, that made it easier to knock guys into. You can see in this early lobby screen that it had smaller pipes at that time, that didn't reach the floor. It was pretty difficult to get dudes into there.
I also had the damage (elim at the time) volumes sticking out a little, so it was odd that you'd hit a guy into a wall, and he'd disintegrate. Not the best.
Adding the Kneecapper proved to be the thing that made this early version viable. The fact that it did damage meant that I could add in "assists count for scoring", and that let things get recorded properly. It's pretty much impossible to do this with devices (guards don't register as scoring elims when knocked into various volumes), and I wrestled with the Assistant for a couple days to try and get things working, but it still didn't really do what I wanted it to. BroughtVulture did some work on it as well, but I parked those changes for...
TMNT Picks
I found out about the TMNT team-themed build contest shortly after publishing my original map, which gave me some motivation to try and polish it as much as I could within a couple weeks.
I ended up just rolling back to the "assists = points" for scoring for the contest, just to eliminate edge cases.
I'm pretty sure at this point we had:
Matches were 3 rounds of about 5 minutes each.
Rounds had all of the following happen in one bucket
3 boss spawns, mouser event, etc., all happening in a pile per round
Hire turtles and/or April and Casey.
goongala was live then, I think, and I had the VO hooked up.
During the end of August to late September, I didn't really do much on the map, because I didn't want to mess up my chances at the contest. I just played it periodically and took notes for things I'd like to change.
Spoiler: didn't win anything. But I'm glad for the motivation to crank on it for awhile.
My House:
With the contest over, I was free to break things again, so I recalibrated a lot of mechanics.
Match is 99 rounds because why not. No need to kick people to lobby.
Each round is broken up into sections
intro: very short chance to move into position if you want
first period (wave): normal Foot/Krang gameplay, Spawn Bebop (drops Kinetic sword).
Intermission1: Mouser event
Second period: same as 1, but Rocksteady (drops Staff).
Intermission2: Krang's android (drops Bass Boost gloves)
Third period: ditto others but Meowscles (because I couldn't use Takeshi/tiger) (drops swords)
overtime (just a moment to breathe before victory screen.
moved all the spawn points into the air, so guys drop in. Feels better and cooler and less jarring than teleporting.
FCHQ feedback:
I submitted this for feedback with the FCHQ community, and WornSnow tested it and gave great feedback. Recent releases have included changes such as:
renamed Period to Wave in case people are more gamer than hockey brained
fixed lighting/fog in general, and specifically to improve it on phones (was blown out on mobile)
dropped items rot after awhile (pickups destroyed after 15s)
added additional weapons (shockwave hammer and grenade launcher)
various map adjustments to keep the new weapons from being glitchy/exploits
more goo is leaking out in cracks near Shredder
made the fences invulnerable and made the sidelines not ice, tightening up the playable area.
moved the healing station (penalty box) down to floor level
new custom Goongala meter UI.
Future stuff:
I really want to do stuff like
intro and other cinematics with April interviewing Casey
Casey's pad: hub to allow me to add other minigames, and be a better resting point.
more VFX/Auras/Goongala stuff.
More custom UI.
Boss Fight
Arena gets progressively trashed wave after wave.
shove to be actually useful (need custom weapon to give it more knockback and do damage)
easy/med/hard levels/scalability with guard aggro and goal size.
Anyway, it's pretty fun to just knock each other around. Grab some friends. Leave me some feedback.
