Sumo Strikers

Background

Sumo Strikers was made in 5 weeks as part of the 2024 Games Fleadh competition, held in TUS university competing against people from all over Ireland. This is a 3D, top down, party game of up to 4 players, with the goal of using power-ups to push your friends off platforms until there's only one left standing. The jam theme was "start with nothing" and in this game, the players began with no abilities, gaining stronger ones over time and also grew larger with each round win.

Game Jam Winning Prize

Sumo Strikers won the top prize for the Games Fleadh 2024 competition in the category for "Best Game Built Using a Game Engine". The game received positive feedback from all the groups that played it because of its fast paced gameplay and competitive nature against friends.

Afterwards, it was showcased at events such as the TUD 2024 Project Fair and the first Godó Gaedhleach event in 2026 for playtesting. More people gave it a shot, where it received critical feedback for how we could update the game and fix bugs.

The Development

This game was made by me and my friends; Dylan, George and Daniel on Godot. There are 5 unique maps in this game, each with varying environment elements to make the movement and combat different every time. We made practically everything ourselves, keeping gameplay simple but focusing more on fun gameplay. Creating all of this in such a short span of time helped keep the scope small, so that there was more time to focus on polishing the gameplay that mattered.

My role was the game director, overseeing the game, listening to the team and planning frequent meetings to help everyone stay on track to reach set milestones on time. From experience working on previous games, a huge priority was make a playable prototype as soon as possible to find if the gameplay loop works well. Everybody had set tasks they had to contribute and it was important that nobody was stuck perfecting something or wasting time with unnecessary content that would overscope or create bloat in the game. Balancing the job with my own tasks was a challenging and fun experience because it made the process much more efficient and allowed me to keep the game consistent in style.

Trello board for scheduling and assigning tasks.

The Journey

After brainstorming with the team, we managed to come up with the main idea for pushing each other off platforms; a simple game with abilities that could help you fight. This was inspired by other party games such as Wii Sports Resort and Boomerang Fu.

Player designs were kept as simplistic as possible, using spheres for easy rolling physics, while allowing for possible future costume skins. This kept focus on the actual gameplay, where we managed to have a working prototype in a day. Using the jolt physics engine for Godot saved us because all we needed was to apply additional forces when players dash into each other, which was managed by George.

Over the next few weeks, Dylan created all the maps for the game, creating all 3D models from scratch to add to the experience. Daniel made all of the power ups and the Casino level.

I contributed by working on the player growth & movement, controller connections, an animated intro video and creating a power up selection system. The intro was just a fun way of setting the scene and giving lore for the game, entirely made in just a day.

Near the end of the development, we had finished all of our milestones on time to get the core features into the game. This meant that we could focus on bugfixing, playtesting and polishing. These last finishing touches really added a level of quality which made our game stand out, since that was way more important than quantity.

After finishing the game and winning the Games Fleadh, we went back to developing it further. A complete refactor to the code base was done to clean up for future systems and mechanics we wanted to add for a full release online.

We planned on supporting online multiplayer, which showed promising results, and having a more complex fighting system. Due to scheduling conflicts and scope, we ended up cancelling the development, postponing the actual release.

Project Documentation