Version 2.0 Release

Hello!

It's been about two years since I've shared an update for ¿Quién es el Mechaburro? I've made a few other Bevy games since then, like Adore's Antiques and Go Tower Go, but with each release of the Bevy engine I've been trying to keep Mechaburro up-to-date as an exercise in learning the new features and a bit of a sandbox to test out ideas or improve my code organization.

In 2023 I joined a community of game developers where I live and was encouraged to add features to showcase the game at a local arcade bar. I got really good feedback, which was a good opportunity to learn and improve the game. Unfortunately, at some point I ran into a bug with the web version of the game and set it aside for a few months but I finally found time to fix it, so I'm calling this "version 2.0" of ¿Quién es el Mechaburro?

Here are a some of the new features!

• new Burro select screen
  • players can also select color outlines for their burro on this screen
• Up to 8 players (jam version had 4 players + 4 bots)
• Burros can now dodge (shift button or shoulder buttons on controllers)
• Actual analog controller support
• Outlines and Toon shader
• New music that I wrote this time (the old music was a bop for sure, but I didn't write it and I wanted something that had really clear licensing)
• super cool backgrounds that change on each level
• Settings screen updates
  • number of bots
  • difficulty of the mechaburro (mechaburrito, mechaburro and mechagigante!)
  • number of rounds
  • fences on or off or invisible
• Fences keep burros on the level, but when there are 2 burros left they drop and burros can fall off the edge. It gives a "sudden death" vibe at the end
• new levels!
• lasers have lights now
• there are now Balloons attached to the burros which indicate their health
• Using rapier physics now so levels can have different elevations
• Camera shake!
• When burros are eliminated, they explode into confetti
• The burros have actual animations now!
• 4 new burros
• New end-of-round screen
• New-end-of-game screen (the winning burros can move during this scene!)
• A lot of refactoring making it easier to add levels and burros

Here's a before and after of the character select screen

And this is a before and after of what it looks like during gameplay

Showcasing the game at the arcade bar was a really cool experience and I'd recommend anyone making games to get as many random people to play your games as you can and watch them play. It's wild how immediately you can see issues you've been blind to just by handing someone a controller to your game.

One player quickly figured out a bug that lets you shoot a ton of candy in a row. It's difficult to pull off, you have to dodge and shoot on the same frame.. It might be easier on controllers? Obviously, I had to keep that in because it's so cool, here's a clip of it:

And here are some pictures from that day at the arcade bar:

I briefly entertained the idea of making an arcade cabinet for ¿Quién es el Mechaburro? but I think it's still missing something. I still enjoy the "randomly a player is upgraded" mechaburro concept, but I don't know how well it fits as an arcade game and it somewhat limits what I can add to it but.. also, it's kinda what the game is designed around, even the name of it kinda implies it 🤔.

With Bevy 0.13 coming up, I'll probably once again update Mechaburro and do another round of bug fixes.. One thing I want to address is the audio issue in the browsers which happens when playing audio while loading assets. Weirdly, in the past I have found Chrome works better but now it seems like the game works better in Firefox.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the updates and if you have any suggestions on more improvements/mechanics that would be fantastic. Cheers!