Knockout!

Welcome to Knockout! This is a simple multiplayer deathmatch game, where you get points by knocking opponents off the map into the blue abyss below. Your only weapon is the ability to launch red projectiles that, when hitting an opponent, launches them back: if you hit them in the head it will send them flying across the map to immanent peril.

Controls

This Game is Multiplayer, and best suited for LAN parties

 Currently, the game only supports peer-to-peer networking, so it is best played in a LAN environment with your friends. I like to think of it as an old school experience in that way. Theoretically, it should support Wide Area Networks (WAN) if your buddy on the other side of the galaxy forwarded the right ports, but I haven't tried it yet.

Anyway, this was somewhat intentional: it made the scope of the initial version of this game much easier. In the future, I will update this to support a richer suite of modes (see below: Future Features).

Future Features

What you see now is the first, absolutely bare-minimum game. I set a goal for myself to get a minimum product out there, and I did! But this is only the beginning of Knockout! Here is a non-exhaustive list of features I want to add:

• More maps
• More game-modes, and ways to tune games
  • Things like choosing the time limit
  • Perhaps an elimination game mode
  • Dueling mode: 1 v 1
  • Different projectile types
• Single-player + bot support
• Proper dedicated server support
• Tuning the multiplayer there already is
• I've caught a few jittering issues and problems with players spawning which, I'll be honest: I haven't the first clue on how to solve it. It's probably going to require a deep-dive into the engine to figure out what my options are for making it a little better
• Optimizations to support low end PCs
• I picked UE5 because it's new-and-shiny, but also very easy to hammer out a product. The problem is, it assumes your consumer wants realistic ray tracing and whatever other nifty features that make your PC sound like a jet about to take off. But c'mon, look at this game: it should be runnable on a potato from 1994.
• Steam support

Finally, if you like this and have any ideas: please comment!

Background

I actually conceptualized this game for years. It was originally a UE3 (yes, 3, like 2007) project from when I was in high school called "Shout". This was in reference to the "shout thu'um" from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (as demonstrated here). I always thought this mechanic would make for an excellent, hectic game. I had to put this project on hold for a long time due to just life, hence it's ludicrously long development cycle. Actually, I did technically finish Shout, but I wanted to rebuild it when I finished college. 

I was also motivated to make a sort of complete "learning shooter" project in UE5. I intent to do more projects with UE5, and I feel like Knockout! is a great sort of workbench for fleshing out common multiplayer game features.

Finally, the game is artistically very inspired by the world famous capture-the-flag game Toblo, which features unprecedented destructive environments; but also it has a great simple art style that I absolutely love.

Credits

I want to give a special thanks to the following people for their phenomenal contributions to this game:

• MatchaJoeJoe for the amazing character design: https://matchajoejoe.games/
• Music: "Cloud Dancer", "Electrodoodle" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
  Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0