Big Head Fighters!
Roles:
Game Design, Programming
Tools:
Unreal Engine 5
Big Head Fighters is a fast-paced PvP game in which the goal is to utilize various physics-altering abilities to pierce through your opponent to score points.
It was developed by a team of three for Arcade Jam 2025 in Calgary.
Challenges & Solutions
The theme of this game jam was "Shift", but the purpose was to emulate an arcade game. From a gameplay design perspective, my main goal was to highlight the high actions-per-minute, button mashing feel of old arcade fighters.
With that in mind, I felt that the best way to make that happen was to give each player completely uncontrolled movement by default, which simply required them to constantly hit buttons to maneuver.
This proved to be a fun challenge, as I created a custom character pawn within Unreal that utilized the Projectile Movement component rather than the standard Character Movement component. In essence, each character is actually a bullet constantly bouncing around with a set speed and friction.
To fit with the theme and our core mechanic, we came up with the idea of "shifting physics". In addition to the primary dash ability, players can also press different inputs to adjust their speed, direction, and even the effect of gravity on the fly.
Early physics testing and tweaking
The character pawn's movement variables
This project was a first for me in some technical areas, which proved to be more challenging than expected.
Utilizing Unreal for 2D sprite art was not something I had done before, so learning how to set up 2D tile maps and characters using a 3D physics engine was a fun challenge, and I think it worked well.
Another was getting two players to work on a single "keyboard" (the arcade machine in our case). Unreal assumes by default that each player has their own input device, so I had to circumvent that by making a shared player controller class, which does manual checks for specific key inputs.
Reflection
I certainly had a lot of fun doing this game jam, as the arcade-style of gameplay is not something I'd ever worked on before. I'm primarily a designer, so it was also a chance to improve my programming skills in Unreal blueprints. I'm thankful for that because I now feel much more confident in my ability to quickly prototype certain mechanics which I wasn't very knowledgeable about before.
While we didn't get in all the mechanics we wanted, I still feel like I achieved my goal with this project. It was very satisfying to watch volunteers play it during our presentation and mash those arcade machine buttons while they desperately try to control themselves and defeat their opponent!
Play
Want to give the game a shot? Check it out on itch.io here. Download the "BigHeadFighters.zip" folder, extract its contents, then run "ArcadeJam2025.exe" to play!
(PC only, works best with arcade stick)