Push Me Pull You — PMPY at Indiecade & Freeplay

This is a little guide on how to play PMPY well. Most of these techniques you should be able to figure out yourself given enough time, but if you want to dive right in (or bring someone else up to your competitive level) this is a good place to start.

The Basics:

Push Me Pull You is all about possession. If you read nothing else in this guide, remember this:

You almost always want to be on the inside, close to the ball, with your head doing the pushing. You want to avoid wrapping around the other team and trying to pull them with your body, because your body is weaker than your heads.

There are subtleties and exceptions to this rule, but that is probably the single best piece of advice you can learn as a new player.

A typical game of PMPY is simple enough. Once you have the ball, you want to get yourself in the best position to defend it, and fend off the opposing team. If you’re attacking, you want to subvert the other team’s hold on the ball, and either take it from them, or find a way to manipulate them into doing your work for you. Here’s how:

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Once we’d designed the characters of Push Me Pull You, we had to find places for them to play. As far as we were concerned, these were normal people, just like you and me - they just happened to be joined together at the waist by a long flesh-tube (you know, like normal).

So when it came to designing the environments for our characters to play in, I wanted to create spaces that reflected our own experiences of playing sport. Most sports games present professional-level play, using the familiar visual language of TV broadcast to put the player in a role that’s part-passive-spectator, part-active-player. There’s a power-fantasy element to this I think - “It’s like I’m watching my favourite sport on TV, but I’m also in control.”

We weren’t (and aren’t) really interested in that side of sports. None of us follow professional sports in any meaningful way, so when it came to giving a context to the invented sport in Push Me Pull You, we were far more interested in presenting the kind of sports we play, not the ones we watch.

This is sport played with friends and family, the people from down the street, the other kids at the campsite on a summer holiday. The stakes are low, and although competition can be fierce, you’re ultimately just playing to have fun with the people around you (this is also one of the big reasons why we love local-multiplayer videogames).

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In a game like Push Me Pull You where a play session is made up of lots of short rounds, you tend to spend a fair bit of time in menus. It might sound tedious, but I think time spent not playing is actually a really important part of the rhythm of round based games. On menu screens you get to have a break, reflect on what you’ve been doing, and talk about what you want do next.

So with PMPY we didn’t want our menus’ design to be an afterthought. We saw them as part of the game itself, and wanted it to feel that way. It took us a while to work out what that actually meant for us. We knew we wanted our menus to feel special, but beyond that our goals were pretty vague.

We wanted to show our characters. The most important thing in our game are the people, and we wanted to show them as much as possible. During development we had a lot of fun drawing them and talked a lot about what they might do in different situations. Any attempt to show them raised a lot of interesting questions (what sort of things do they carry around? Could they use a ladder?) and then menus seemed like a good place to explore these ideas.

The long bodies seemed like a good way to tie things together. We wanted to find a way to represent the progression through the menu screens physically, using the our characters’ long bodies. A big inspiration here was Mini Metro’s train track menus. In that game, each path through the menu is shown as a train line, and choices are represented as stations along the way. I really like the way that this fits in with the look and theme of the game, and also serves to give each screen context and help navigation.

We felt like our characters’ big bodies could do something similar, and make a winding path that physically drew the menu’s progression.

UI World!

So putting these together, we decided to lay our menus out on one big plane, using our characters’ bodies as the links between them. Each scene would have lots of bodies going off screen, and when it was time to go to the next menu, the camera would follow one off to the next scene where their partner would be waiting.

An early draft of our main menu screen. Each body joins up with a corresponding submenu.

As a consequence, this meant most of our menu screens would exist in a single contiguous space. Internally we started calling this space “UI World”.

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One of the reasons we started out making PMPY (and pretty much the reason we became a close group of friends) was a summer we spent playing the then-alpha versions of the incredible Sportsfriends collection.

Sportsfriends hits on something fundamental - local multiplayer games work well together. Once you’ve got your friends together to have a match, having a roster of games to switch between keeps things interesting. Different people are better at certain games, so rivalries can form over a bunch of different play styles.

Beyond Sportsfriends, here are a few of our other favourites that go well alongside PMPY, for you to play at your next gathering:

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After getting a few requests, Michael made these cheery Push Me Pull You wallpapers for your desktop or smartphone!

See the full set below the fold. Just make sure you click though to the high res version.

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When drawing our characters in more complex poses (like we do in the postgame celebration scenes) we quickly ran into a problem - because everything in our game is one flat colour, it’s hard to illustrate depth, especially with something like a character’s body.

This means that every time they’re drawn, characters have to have very clear silhouettes, with no body parts crossing over each other.

Here’s a few sketches showing the development of some of these images. You can see in these (and in most representations of the characters) that the way we get around this problem is to have the characters splaying their arms out wide, which can get awkward when you’re trying to make them do something like play an instrument, or hold a dog.

Generally the longest part of the process of drawing art for our game is just blocking out a pose in a way that makes sense. 

We also had plenty more ideas for funny situations we could place the winning and losing teams in after a game - here are a couple of the more high concept ones that didn’t make the cut.

-Stuart

We’ve been a bit quiet lately, working hard on a whole bunch of stuff, and now we’re very excited to tell you about it:

Look at our nice trailer!
Jake put together our lovely new trailer. There are all kinds of goodies in there which you might not have seen before, including footage of our new variants, new environments, and perhaps most excitingly, a taste of the new music our friend Dan Golding has made for the game. We’re all really excited about this collaboration, which we’ll talk more about soon.

We’re releasing on PS4!
In other huge news, PMPY is officially coming to the PlayStation 4! This is a pretty big get for us as a local-multi, controller based couch game, and we think it will be a great fit. The work of porting the game to PlayStation is already well underway by the very capable League of Geeks (who you might know as the developers of Armello), who, like us, are a Melbourne-based team. You can read more about the PS4 announcement on the official Sony blog.

The best news of all, of course, is that we’re well on track to release PMPY early next year. While it’s not quite finished, we’re well and truly on the home stretch. We’ve been so lucky to get to share PMPY at all the festivals and parties it’s been at so far, and are so looking forward to getting the game into your living rooms.

-Stuart