This past July, I was one of the organizers for the Boston-area MolyJam. This year, the prompt was from a selection of quotes from Peter Molyneux himself.
I was worried I might be pulled off due to duties that organizing the event might entail, so I decided to whip something up on my own.
PROMPT
I’m not punishing you for button mashing; I’m rewarding you for not button mashing, and that is a really big distinction.
I took some heavy inspiration from the humor that QWOP evokes from making movement difficult. Multiplayer games like WrestleJump are very easy to pick up, and a blast to play. What if there was a Western-style duel game, where you had really floppy arms?
After a short amount of time, I had some joint constraints working:
Thanks to the magic of the Unity Asset Store, I quickly whipped together a scene:
After a little bit of work on the joints, it was simply too easy to get the player to manipulate the shoulder/elbow joints. I decided to switch gameplay to be a bit more based on timing.
After a weekend of work, I ended up with a finished game. I don’t think I’ll pursue the idea much further — through this little experiment it became pretty obvious that much of the challenge and enjoyment of QWOP and Wrestle Jump come from balancing against gravity.