Blogs - CowardlyWraith

It is here! Our game, Junkyard Brawl, is now in its full release! Junkyard Brawl is a fighting game where players must out position their opponents in order to knock them around a dangerous battlefield. Each character has a different method of traversing the battlefield, rewarding players for becoming skilled and jumping, swinging, or dashing around the play area.

What's New?

With our gameplay locked down last sprint, our final push added a ton of visual stuff. The menus are cleaner and more interesting to look at, with a new scene to give new players a basic overview of the game. We have a whole new set of skins to choose from. Quilliam can now change the length of the grappling hock. We have squashed a bunch of small bugs that have been lurking for the past few weeks. But by far the biggest was a massive visual overhaul in game. New lighting, sounds, and collision effects makes the core game from last release way more satisfying to play.

What's the Motivation?

We wanted to make sure that all of the people that stuck around for all of the stages of our development had a professional looking game by the end. We were elated at the good feedback we received last week so we focused on make our game professional and satisfying to play. By improving quality of life fixes and making the game more approachable by new players, we hope to hit a wide audience while impressing longtime players.

What's Next?

Our development is done! We may have a few small fixes over the next two days, but other than small bug fixes, our development cycle has come to an end. Next thing for us is showcasing our game in the Video Game Showcase at the University of Michigan, so come check out our booth on Tuesday!

It has been a wild ride over the past six weeks. We here at Cowardly Wraith Studios have been very appreciative of all of the feedback and support our game has gotten, and our game would not be as fun as it is without the community. I hope everyone enjoys our final product. Thank you all for coming on this journey with us!

-The Cowardly Wraith Team

Hello again! We are just a week away from the full release of our game, Junkyard Brawl! Junkyard Brawl is a fighting game where players must out position their opponents in order to knock them around a dangerous battlefield. Each character has a different method of traversing the battlefield, rewarding players for becoming skilled and jumping, swinging, or dashing around the play area.

What's New?

Lots more stages! We have added a stage select menu with three brand new stages to choose from! Each stage features new hazards to push opponents into. We are in the process of balancing our characters around our new maps, so feel free to explore the new play spaces and let us know how each character feels in the new stages. We have made some pretty significant character balancing changes this release already and are getting close to finalizing our three characters, so all feedback is appreciated.

Other than the new stages most of our time has been focused on cleaning up our menus and UI. Expect some new lore-based flavor test, cleaner menus, and more tutorial text. We also added rounds to our combat to make each game more rewarding. We wanted to make sure that each play session was fun and well explained, so hopefully that is demonstrated in this new release.

What's the Motivation?

As our development cycle reaches an end, we wanted to clean up all of the parts that make games fun to play: clean menus, replayabilty, and some basic tutorials. We are very happy with how our game feels to play, with only small tweaks planned in the future. to the main gameplay aspects. This build will hopefully demonstrate how the game will look and feel at release time.

What's Next?

We are much more focused on making a clean game in this last week of development. We are going to take the deep and fun game that we have created over the past few weeks and are going to make sure that it is clean and ready for release. We have gotten a lot of great feedback over the past few releases, so we will make sure that most of those concerns are addressed. We here at Cowardly Wraith can't wait to create the game that you all have wanted to see since the beginning of our development.

Take a look at our prerelease build and let us know what you think! Our final release is just a week away, and we are so excited to show you the final game we have been working on for so long!

-The Cowardly Wraith Team

Hello lovely people! We are back with the beta release of our game, Junkyard Brawl! Junkyard Brawl is a fighting game where players must out position their opponents in order to knock them around a dangerous battlefield. Each character has a different method of traversing the battlefield, rewarding players for becoming skilled and jumping, swinging, or dashing around the play area.

What's New?

We have a lot of new features for you to enjoy! The first is a brand new character, Ferrous! Ferrous' love of robots allows her to pull targets towards her, potentially putting them in danger and dealing damage. Players will have to use the map along with the new environmental hazards to claim victory over opponents. She is currently in development so expect some bugs and rough edges.

The next addition are new environmental hazards! Our old static stage will now be filled with conveyor belts, furnaces, and scrap metal that can be used to deal major damage to enemy bots! We have removed damage from running into any surface in exchange for these new damaging objects, so players will need to find new strategies to take out their opponent.

Finally, we made interactables throwable. With these three big additions, there are a whole new set of skills and strategies to master.

What's the Motivation?

We are making a push for the end of our development so our team focused on adding all of the new gameplay elements that are going to be in the final game. With more complicated stages and additional actions for players to take, we can focus on refining these elements in the future. The next few releases will be focused on cleaning the elements we have and making our final product both fun and strategic.

What's Next?

Refinement! We want to take all of these new elements and add them to new stages to really have a content-filled final product. We still have a few sketches for more characters after this one but no promises at the moment.

We are just a few weeks away from the release of our final product, so I hope this beta release has you all as excited as we are!

-The Cowardly Wraith Team

Welcome to the alpha release of our new game, Junkyard Brawl! Junkyard Brawl is a fighting game where players must out position their opponents in order to knock them around a dangerous battlefield. Each character has a different method of traversing the battlefield, rewarding players for becoming skilled and jumping, swinging, or dashing around the play area.

What's New?

We are about half way through our planned development cycle and have spent the last week locking down the core mechanics of our game. We have revamped the physics system and finalized character design to include one primary move that is unique for each character. We also redesigned our play area in order to give players more room to move and position themselves. This alpha build includes a single stage with all new art, bringing us closer to the final release look of our game.

The biggest experimental part of our game is a new control scheme that uses both controller sticks instead of the one stick system from the past. We have gotten mixed feedback from players and are hoping to do some A-B testing to see how the game feels with two sticks, so expect a sneaky second build included in the alpha release.

What's the Motivation?

We have experimented with a few different directions to take the game in over the last few weeks and wanted to spend this week finalizing the core of our game. The hope is that we can use the rest of the design process to add more characters, add more graphics, and overall make the game look and sound better. This alpha build is a good representation on how the game and future characters will feel by the final release, so look forward to more additions that major changes over the next few releases.

What's Next?

More characters, more graphics, more juice, more fun! We have also been experimenting with a few different stage designs so expect a few more maps over the next few weeks as well. We are also going to see if the two stick control system is the direction we want to go, or stick with our current one stick system.

Overall, enjoy playing the alpha of our game and look forward to our beta which will hopefully out in a little over a week!

-The Cowardly Wraith Team