Those with a keen eye may have noticed that last month’s blog post not only showed the new punch effect, but gave a brief preview to what the new punching bag game looks like! As a refresher, you can see the old one in the gif below. I’m happy to announce that although fundamentally the punching bag has not changed, there are several differences which I believe have improved the entire experience. Let’s quickly go over the main changes to not only the punching bag, but all of the strength-focused games as a whole.
First and foremost, the biggest factor on your score originally was what I called the “minimum power setting”. This was an option which allowed players to adjust the minimum value which would register as a valid “punch” when playing the strength games. For example, let’s say the value was set to 75. This meant that any time you connected with a punch and the value was below 75, your punch value would be displayed in red text and the action would not count in any context. In many cases, it would also reset your score multiplier. The original goal of this power value was to give a huge incentive to the strength aspect of the games. If users were confident they would throw consistent, hard punches, their scores would be hugely increased versus users who would leave it at the minimum value. The second goal was to prevent little quick weenie punches of values which barely register on the force calculator from being used. After-all these are the strength games, not the quick-small hit games. Unfortunately, as nice as the idea is in theory, in practice it is needlessly complicated and has been completely removed in favor of simplicity. Just look at all those powerful swings!
As far as punching bag specifics go, the biggest change is related to the “targets” which would randomly appear around the punching bag (see the July 2017 blog post). Players would chase down these targets and punch them down until they eventually exploded. These targets were previously pretty small and a little obnoxious to run and find. In order to streamline this aspect, the targets have been changed to entire sides of the punching bag. Every 12 seconds, either the front, left, or right side of the bag will have a large target appear and begin to glow. The back of the bag has been omitted in the interest of users with limited play space. Players then have 10 seconds to make their way to that side of the bag and beat that target down until it disappears, granting a large amount of bonus points. The starting HP of the targets is determined by the user and they can increase or decrease the value via a setting on the menu. Greater values reward greater bonus points upon defeat, but be wary…as the level increase so does the HP of the targets! Run out of time and the target disappears before you’ve had a chance to beat it into submission? Get ready to eat a score penalty.
So what hasn’t changed about the punching bag? The time factor is still the same as it was before. That is, users select how long they would like to beat up the punching bag for and are granted that much time to deal as much damage as possible and accrue as many points as they can. Spending more time against the bag will obviously grant a greater number of points. There is also a slightly hidden mechanic related to the time setting, but I can’t give away all the secrets, now can I?
Over the next month I will be polishing up and balancing things with this game to get it
completely finished before next moving on to the Punching Board overhaul.