Push Me Pull You

Advanced PMPY

Thu, 14 Jul 2016 17:18:21 +1000

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:

Controls:

Move with your control stick. Hold your Bumper/L1/R1 to shrink, and your Trigger/L2/R2 to grow. You can also click in your stick (L3 or R3) to make your character talk. This can be useful if you’re losing track of which character you are, or a good way to confirm which thumb is which controlling which head if you’re playing as both characters at once.

Length:

A key skill in PMPY is controlling your length - this is a resource you share with your partner, so communicating to them what you’re doing is important.

A lot of people assume at first glance “the shorter you are, the harder you can push”. This isn’t technically true - strength is actually based on how stretched you are - but being smaller does mean that your heads are generally nice and close to each other, doubling your pushing power, and enabling you to coordinate more easily. Being small is perfect for weaseling into the formation of the other team with a concentrated attack, but makes controlling the ball tricky once you’ve got a hold of it.

Being long is about control - you can use your slack to pull the ball along easily, wrap it up in a defensive position like the snail, and even manipulate the other team by blocking them off with your body.
However, being long when you don’t have the ball is generally not advisable. You’ll move more slowly with your body dragging behind you, and you’ll be more easily split apart, allowing the other team to stretch your body, making you lose your grip.

Zipping:

An essential maneuver. Let go of your control stick, and hold the shrink button. This is the most effective way to regroup if you get separated from your partner. Because you are not pushing in any direction, you have no grip and will ‘zip’ straight to your teammate.

Zipping is an effective counter to the poke, and the fastest way to move anywhere in PMPY. You can use this not only to avoid being stretched by the other team, but also to quickly change your hold on the ball if you’re defending it, getting away from your opponents, or leaving them pushing against thin air.

Playbook:

Stretched
The state in which a body has been stretched too high above its relaxed length, and it’s players start to lose their grip.

Bag
A hold where the team makes a horseshoe shape, and uses it to drag the ball around.

Locked bag
Where players fold the top of a bag closed, making it harder for the other team to get in.

Snail
A hold where a team wraps itself around the ball in a spiral shape. An effective way to keep control of the ball. The player on the outside of the snail should try and stop the other team from trying to weasel in.

Scroll
A sticky situation in which both teams are trying to wrap around the ball, and are spiraling around each other. Because you’re effectively at a stalemate, it’s important to know when to break out of the scroll, and when to keep pushing.

Weasel
This is where a player tries to sneak into a defensive position (usually a snail). When trying to weasel, it’s important to approach the snail from the correct direction (counter-clockwise for a clockwise snail, and vice versa). Once inside the snail, it’s often a good idea to puff up and break the snail from within.

Puff Up
Growing a large amount very quickly while inside an opponents hold in order to disrupt the hold and stretch their body.

Stick AKA Spear
When a player pushes the middle of the opposing team’s body, causing them to become stretched and lose their grip.

Cannonball
Where a team shrinks down small, and tries to push straight through the other team’s body. Uses the strength of a two-person stick to break through a defensive wall.

Carousel
When players using a snail grow and shrink to spin the snail around. The player on the inside of the snail should grow, and the player on the outside should shrink. This is an effective way to stop a weasel but leaves the snail vulnerable to being pushed from the outside.

Pivot
A technique whereby the team who has the ball in a bag will deliberately move in the opposite direction they want the ball to move, in order to swing the ball back around behind them, using the opposing team’s heads as a fulcrum.

Discover your own!

These are just some of the plays we’ve formalised amongst ourselves over the course of making the game. Your matches will evolve in the same way ours have, with strategies and counter-strategies emerging over time. We think there’s a lot of depth to uncover, so hopefully we’ll see you at EVO in a few years time??

Where is PMPY played?

Wed, 18 May 2016 17:42:51 +1000

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).

There’s a reason why there are no fictional spectators in PMPY. Early on we toyed with the idea of animated spectators or crowd sounds, but in the finished game, if you stop playing, all you’ll hear is the rustling of wind in trees, birdsong, or the hum of a lawnmower. I like to think of each match in PMPY as a private moment between the players as they play for no-one but themselves.

The settings for this kind of sport are often mundane, and overlooked by videogames, so I wanted the environments of Push Me Pull You to quietly celebrate this mundanity. I wanted to make them feel specific and personal, but also wholly unexceptional, in the way that the special places in our lives often are.

I also wanted to capture a certain Australian-ness in the environments, while avoiding the obvious signifiers and caricature. I was inspired by another game from Melbourne - Movement Study 1 - “a New Realist movement simulator and short adventure game about youth in Melbourne”. The environment art is just so specifically, unflinchingly Melbourne. It felt so special to see such a familiar place in a videogame, that I wanted to try to capture a similar kind of specific sense of place.

Each of the playfields in Push Me Pull You - a suburban street, a beach, a park, a gym, a backyard, and a local club - were all inspired by real locations from my life. Using mostly memory, and a bit of help from Google Earth, I tried to capture some truth from my life in these places. I even went out and field-recorded the atmospheric tracks, replacing the technically-much-nicer sound library recordings we were using as placeholders. To hear familiar, local birdsong in the game made the whole thing feel a little like a love letter to home.

I took the same personal approach when drawing the environments in PMPY. There’s the dead-end street that my childhood best friend grew up on, the park across the road from my parents’ house, my aunt and uncle’s backyard, the clay tennis courts in a beachtown outside Melbourne, and the beach of that same town. The blue-matted gym in PMPY was where I was briefly enrolled in a gymnastics class as a tiny kid, and only found out last week that Stuart had done a gymnastics class at that same gym. We wouldn’t become friends for another decade, and had no idea of this earlier connection, so it felt very special to realise that he associated the environment art with the same remembered place as me!

I associate all these places with the kind of informal sport mentioned above. Some are linked to childhood memories and others more recent, but they all hold memories of playfulness. I don’t expect the specifics of these places to be meaningful to players, but I hope the specificity itself has some power, and that players might, for a moment, remember these playful, mundane, special places in their own lives.

- jake

UI World

Mon, 16 May 2016 17:00:34 +1000

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”.

Restrictions

This idea meant that right off the bat, each scene had some important requirements. At the very least, each scene required:

A way to show the menu in question
At least one character for each connected scene to allow for the transitions

So before we could even start work on the scenes, we needed to work out what the menu in question would look like, and what connections it would have. To work this out we used a menu flowchart we had made, that showed all the connections.

This flowchart of game states helped us work out what was needed from each UI World scene.

So looking at this chart we could work out that the main menu needed to a way to show it’s three options, and at least three characters whose bodies would form the three transitions.

Not getting too specific

Originally our menu people (internally called ‘UI friends’) were all bespoke, so we first assumed we would just draw a specific character for each one. But in practice this felt really weird. When the UI friends looked the same every time but the player characters were always different, the UI friends started to feel like they were more important.

We liked the idea of this burly coach with a mustache, but they were special in a way that made them seem like the game’s main character, which we definitely didn’t want.

Once we realised this we changed our plans and started using our customisable arthead for all our UI friends (except one), and had the game generate random faces for all them each time you play.

Joining up the scenes

Once we had a rough idea what each of our UI scenes were going to look like, we tried laying them out spatially, to see if the bodies lined up okay.

For our first pass we just stitched our drafts together in a big photoshop file.

UI World was starting to take shape!

Body width

It was around this point that we realised the UI friends were different sizes in each scene, which created a bit of a problem. We had intended on drawing the bodies as fixed width, and weren’t keen on having them taper in, because that’s not how they look in game.

This body is too narrow for the person with the clipboard, but too wide for the one holding the ‘options’ card. In the final game, the scene with the clipboard was made smaller, and the camera zooms in until it looks full size.

Our solution was to scale each scene so that the bodies were the same size, and then to have the camera zoom level change during a transition, counteracting that scaling. This meant the bodies could go from wide to narrow, but would always look fixed with at any given time.

Bodies and cameras

For each transition, we had to create two splines. A body that joins the two friends together, and a path that the camera travels along to get from one scene to the other. Before we started we thought it might be easier to use use a single spline for both the body and the camera, but found that following the body too closely made the camera feel really unnatural, so we made them separately.

The camera paths are shown in red.

Once we had the body and camera path, we could start to get a feel of what these transitions felt like in game, and began a long process of tweaking the distance, duration, body and camera path of each transition.

In general we made things faster and simpler over time, as we tried to preserve the novelty of UI World while making it more usable and less in your face. Longer transitions were funny the first time, but the joke wore thin pretty quickly. So in the final game, all the transitions are pretty quick, except the transition to the How To Play screen, which we safely assume that players will only look at a couple times.

Shaping the bodies

Shaping the bodies provided some unique challenges, because UI World doesn’t really have a floor. In the Play Menu for example, the easel is presumably sitting on the ground, and the dog appears to be laying on the ground, but in the transition to Variants the camera moves further down and suddenly the dog’s body looks more like it is hanging. Keeping these spaces vague let us get away with a lot.

In the local scene, marked by the red frame, the dog looks like it’s laying on the ground. During a transition things look more ambiguous, but it never looks wrong.

Avoiding overlaps

Another challenge was making sure that bodies went their separate ways with enough clearance that they wouldn’t be visible from other transitions. Early on we thought it might be fun for you to see other bodies as you wooshed by (or even have them overlap), but in practice there was too little context for these other bodies to be recognisable. If you saw another body without seeing it’s head first, it just looked like a line. This is the reason why the Play - How To Play body rises so sharply. It has to get out of the way of the Play - Variants camera path.

Music

One of the best parts of UI World, and the last to go in, was our very ambitious dynamic music system. To take our concept one step further, we decided it would be pretty good if every scene in UI World had it’s own music track so that we could crossfade between them as the camera moved along.

I can’t remember if we originally proposed this to our composer, Dan Golding, as a joke or if we were serious from the get go. But Dan immediately ran with the idea, and ended up recording dozens of unique tracks that we could crossfade between (with six of them ending up in UI World specifically).

We aren’t the first people to use a system like this, but we might be among the first to make one with so much variety solely for a game’s menu.

From the moment we first put it in the game, this music system felt really good. The movement of the camera made it feel very natural for the music to crossfade as you approached a new scene, and it made UI World feel much bigger as a consequence. All the credit here goes to Dan, who went above and beyond to find the best way to make all this work musically. Thanks to him, UI World feels like one consistent piece, but each screen feels like it’s own song. I’m really keen to get the complete story of Push Me Pull You’s music down on paper somewhere, but without Dan’s help I’ll have to leave it there for now.

And finally…

The final layout of UI World.

-Nico

PMPY has been out for a week! It’s a little scary to watch our...

Fri, 13 May 2016 17:53:18 +1000

PMPY has been out for a week! It’s a little scary to watch our labour of love go out into the world to be played by people we’ve never even met. Some of those people are members of the press, and luckily, a whole bunch of them seem to like the game, and have even said so in public!

Here are some of our favourites:

We met up with Jess Joho from Killscreen at GDC, and had a great time talking about all the things we love about PMPY, from designing for accessibility, to making gross sound effects, and even what it might be like to be attached to your grandma for your whole life.

Megan Farokhmanesh and Allegra Frank from Polygon teamed up (how appropriate) to review PMPY, and gave it a score of 8.5! We were thrilled that they called PMPY “one of the most fast-paced, unique and entertaining additions to the genre”.

We were so pleased to read that Lizzie Finnegan from The Escapist spent Mothers Day playing PMPY with her kids! The thought of an entire family playing PMPY together makes me so so so happy, and to hear that “from youngest to oldest, [they] all enjoyed the hell out of it” makes it even better.

Tim Poon over at Platform Nation had a really interesting take on the role of unspoken cooperation that is needed to succeed at PMPY - something that we generally take for granted because this sort of instinct and intuition has become second nature for us. It’s especially rewarding to see someone ‘get’ an element of your game that you hadn’t ever put into words yourself.

PMPY’s been featured in a whole bunch of streams - PewDiePie, Polygon, Kotaku, Giantbomb, Achievement Hunter and many more! We’ve curated a playlist of the best ones over on the House House Youtube Channel.

We’ve got a few of our favourites after the cut:

Nichboy and co. explore the different player/controller configurations for Good Game:

Giantbomb’s extensive look at the different game modes on offer:

Polygon’s sometimes disturbing, role-play heavy playthrough (featuring lots of voices they’ve assigned to different haircuts):

[Facebook video doesn’t embed in tumbl very well so click here!]

And maybe one of our favourite pieces of footage; a supercut of all the times Rooster Teeth uttered the phrase “there we go” over the course of their playthrough. It gets super intense as they play so make sure you watch til the end

It’s been exciting/scary putting PMPY out in the world, but so rewarding. Thanks to everyone who’s written about it, streamed it, told their friends, or just had a good time playing! ❤️

- jake

Local-Multi Playlist

Thu, 12 May 2016 18:42:53 +1000

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:

Regular Human Basketball

From the makers of Crawl (also a great party game in its own right), RHB captures the feeling of frantic teamwork we tried to put into all aspects of PMPY.

I’ve never played a ten-player game, so I can only imagine how coordinating a big team must feel, but even with 2-4 people orchestrating a play is just the right amount of frustrating before it’s perfectly satisfying. It’s also free!

Tennnes

Jan Willem Nijman’s (one half of Vlambeer) super minimal, super ‘feel’ focused take on tennis. Plenty of depth and nuance, and a solid risk vs. reward approach to cheating that I really appreciate.

Samurai Gunn

Samurai Gunn is a little different to the others on this list as it doesn’t really fit into the ‘appropriating sports’ category, but deserves a mention as easily our most played game during development. Possibly the game that makes me feel most in tune with it when I’m on a good streak. It’s hard to tell just from a video just how finely tuned everything is, so if you haven’t played it yet, it’s absolutely worth a shot.

-Stuart

PMPY Wallpapers!

Thu, 12 May 2016 00:50:13 +1000

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.

Today is the big day! Push Me Pull You is out today on PS4.It’s...

Tue, 03 May 2016 10:30:20 +1000

Today is the big day! Push Me Pull You is out today on PS4.

It’s arriving alongside another trailer that shows some longer form gameplay, and more of PMPY’s lovely soundtrack which was composed, performed, recorded and mixed by the incredible Dan Golding.

We want to take this opportunity to answer all your questions about the release:

Is it out, like, right now?

~~Maybe! The releases are staggered a bit throughout different regions, so it depends where you live. If it’s not available yet, it should be really soon.~~

Yes!

What do I need to play?

For this release, you’ll need a PS4. Push Me Pull You will be coming to computers too, but you’ll have to wait a little longer for that. When it’s ready, the game will be on Windows, Mac and Linux via Steam, Itch.io and Humble.

How many people can play?

2-4 people can play at once, but Push Me Pull You is a great spectator sport, so you can’t really have too many players.

How many controllers do I need?

Push Me Pull You is designed with controller sharing in mind. So you can play with two people per controller if need be.

This means you can play a two player game with a single controller, and only two controllers are needed to play with four players.

In short: at least one for every two players.

Is there an online component?

No, the game is local multiplayer only. Adding online would have forced us to leave behind lots of the things that make the game special (due to both technical and non-technical limitations).

QWOP & Super Pole Riders developer Bennett Foddy does a pretty good job of explaining why online doesn’t necessarily make sense for local multiplayer games in this piece for Polygon.

Can I play with my PS Vita?

If you have a PS4 and a PS Vita you use the Vita as an extra screen + controller via remote play.

This could mean using it as your second controller or playing in another room.

Who can I play with?

The game is relatively easy to learn for non-gamers. So if you can’t meet up for a competitive match in person but still want to play, it might be a good one to try with someone you wouldn’t normally play games with.

More Sketches

Mon, 02 May 2016 10:00:55 +1000

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

Great news! We’ve finally got a release date! Push Me Pull You...

Fri, 22 Apr 2016 01:01:47 +1000

Great news! We’ve finally got a release date! Push Me Pull You is coming out May 3rd on Playstation 4, with a Windows/Mac/Linux release soon to follow.

We’ve put together our best trailer yet to celebrate.

We’re so grateful to everyone who’s been following along with us; we definitely had no idea what we were getting into when we started working on the game a little over two years ago.

We’ll be sure to keep you posted on the computer release, and we’ll have plenty of new little videos and write-ups to put on the blog over the next couple of weeks.

PS: If you live in Sony’s European territories (which includes Australia, like us), you can actually pre-order PMPY right now!

Big news for PMPY!

Thu, 19 Nov 2015 03:06:11 +1100

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

Post-game celebration

Fri, 17 Jul 2015 18:10:04 +1000

Now you can see what happens to the players after a game.

Looks like the losers got bit by a crab.

The Arthead

Fri, 12 Jun 2015 13:50:47 +1000

When we decided to add pictures of our characters doing things other than playing sports, our customisable characters gave us a problem. How could we draw the winners of the match when we didn’t know what the winners were going to look like?

We couldn’t just draw someone eating ice cream, we needed a way to show anyone eating ice cream. We could use our in-game art, but then everyone would have be drawn from top down.

We needed something less restrictive, that would still let every picture work with every character.

Our solution was to create a second view of our character’s faces, that works with every possible face, that can be dropped into other drawings. We call it the ‘arthead’.

-Nico

Our Camera

Tue, 05 May 2015 23:41:05 +1000

I recently watched Itay Keren’s GDC talk about camera design for 2D games. It’s really good, you should watch it too if you like that sort of thing. In the talk, Itay takes a comprehensive look at different camera techniques, explains what they are good for, and shows how they work with animated screenshots. Watching it inspired me to share how the PMPY camera works.

During the first few months of development, the camera was something we didn’t think about at all. We originally had a fixed camera that showed the whole court. You could see everything at all times, and we assumed we were finished. We had made a perfectly fine camera first try, and that was that.

PMPY one month in - I guess we were only targeting square screens.

As time went on we started getting frustrated that our characters looked so small, and that large parts of the screen were completely empty. In hindsight, it’s obvious that our camera was to blame, but the solution wasn’t obvious to us at all. In desperation we actually tried making our court very small, just to zoom everything in. It took us a long time to realise that a dynamic camera might help.

Once we decided to create a dynamic camera, I made a few goals to guide us

The players should be ‘front and center’ at all times.
Avoid having ‘dead’ screen space.
The camera can’t be distracting/dizzying (our game is already busy enough, visually).
Players need to know where they are on the court (left side, right side etc.) even if the camera is zoomed in.

Our eventual system

First I make a list of everything that I would like to keep on screen. For PMPY this is every part of the player’s bodies, the ball, and the center point of the court (so players know where they are).

These points provide a bounding box (shown in green), which is the smallest rectangle that contains them all. I then add a fixed width margin to the bounding box, to keep the important action away from the edges of the screen (shown in red).

I then make a ‘target camera’. The center of the target camera is the center of the red/green boxes, and the zoom level is either the tightest zoom that will still show the whole box, or a preset maximum zoom level if that is too close. Capping the zoom helps avoids the camera feeling too swoopy when players come close together. It’s a bit hard to see in the image above, but the target camera’s position is shown by the red dot in the image below.

The target camera can be a bit jerky, so I take an extra step to smooth it out. Once I have the target camera, I add it to a ring buffer that stores the last ten target cameras from previous frames. The buffer cameras are shown by the black dots.

The final camera position is the average position and zoom level of the 10 target cameras, shown in blue. Because the blue dot is used as the actual camera position, it is always in the very center of the image.

Once we had it all working, the game felt way better. Suddenly everything on screen was contributing to the feeling motion, and the character’s actions were much larger. It was as though we had made the game faster and more energetic, and it was much nicer to play.

-Nico

Freeplay 2015

Mon, 04 May 2015 16:41:19 +1000

So Freeplay just finished up here in Melbourne, and we won some nice awards!

(Nice in that it was nice to win the awards. As you can see though, the awards themselves are extremely nice.)

PMPY took home the Best Design Award, as well as the overall Freeplay award, so we’re feeling very blessed/lucky/flattered.

If you missed out on any Freeplay stuff you can watch clips here. I would highly recommend it, everything I’ve seen so far has been really impressive.

Thanks so much again to everyone who helped put it together!

-Stuart

Introducing variants

Wed, 29 Apr 2015 16:08:28 +1000

Unlike other local-multiplayer games that create gameplay variation with an array of settings that tweak minor gameplay variables, PMPY will feature a number of distinct variant modes. These variants overhaul the tightly-refined “core” game mode, presenting mechanical twists that feel like whole other sports. Here’s our first variant:

Each team has their own ball to defend.

Push your opponents’ ball out of the ring first to score a point.

The variant doesn’t have a real name yet - so far we’ve been calling it “two-ball mode”, but that’s probably going to change soon.

Games of two-ball have a very different pace to our standard sport. Each point starts in an equilibrium with both teams in a defensive stance, and things slowly unravel from there. Having two focus points also allows a natural way for players to split up, one playing offense and the other defense.

We took two-ball along when we showed PMPY as part of the Indie MEGABOOTH at GDC this year, and showed it off for the first time. We were really pleased with how it went. People got it straight away, and had some really competitive games. Some people who played two-ball on their first game assumed it was our main game-mode, and didn’t seem phased by it at all.

We noticed some good tactics and formations after watching people play.

This stance lets players control a second ball while keeping their own wrapped up tight.

Players can shrink down and hope to rush their opponents’ ball out, ignoring their own ball all together. This is very much an “all or nothing” strategy.

This position is a bit dangerous. While the pink team has almost all the power, it will be very hard for them to control which ball crosses the line first.

We’ll be adding more variants in the next few months, and will post about them as we do.

-Nico

Our characters make lots of faces

Tue, 07 Apr 2015 17:37:45 +1000

We have tried to use a different face depending on what your character is doing, so when you look closely you can understand how they are feeling.

Ways To Play

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 16:05:00 +1100

Photo by Davis Cox

Push Me Pull You is a game for you and three friends, or at least it is most of the time. But there are other ways to play too.

PMPY
Number of players: 4
Required controllers: 2-4

The standard way to play is with four players, each player controlling a single head of one of the two sports-monsters.

People typically play with four gamepads, one for each player. But the controls are designed so teammates can share a gamepad too. This is called ‘hugsies’ mode, and is recommended if you wish to improve your teamwork.

True PMPY (AKA Australian PMPY)

Number of players: 2
Required controllers: 2

Named after the two-player variant of Hokra - True PMPY is where each player controls both heads of their sports-monster. Playing True PMPY requires serious multitasking skills - it’s a bit like trying to simultaneously pat your head, rub your stomach, and play PMPY.

A tip for learners is to try and focus on just one head, keeping the other in your periphery. It can help you keep track of which is which.

False PMPY

Number of players: 2
Required controllers: 1-2

False PMPY is played by controlling just one head of the sports-monster, letting the other end drag behind you. False PMPY isn’t as tricky as True PMPY to learn, but is just as deep to play.

Having only one active head requires you to use your opponent’s strength in order to carry the ball, so False PMPY favours sneaky players who can lure their opponent into traps.

Competitive players might want to add a rule that only one hand is allowed to touch the controller, as to prevent cheating.

Hybrid PMPY

Number of players: 3
Required controllers: 2-3

With three players, it can be fun to have two players play as a standard team, and have the third player play “true”. Is the player controlling two characters at an advantage or disadvantage? I’m not sure.

-Nico

PMPY at Indiecade & Freeplay

Thu, 09 Oct 2014 09:57:06 +1100

Nico, Jake and Michael will be in LA this weekend for Indiecade. At the festival, PMPY is part of the eSports Showcase, which features games that “combine a high skill ceiling, experimental forms of conflict and teamwork”. It promises to be the best place to play high-level competitive PMPY, so come down and put your friendship to the test - if you dare!

Then, back in Melbourne on October 18, we are showing PMPY as part of the Freeplay festival’s Parallels showcase. Parallels will be hosted at ACMI in Federation Square, and features a free Playday from 11am, and then presentations from creators in the evening. You can get tickets to the evening session here. Warning: this will be our first time talking publicly about the game in our home city, so we might get a bit emotional.

PMPY goes to TOKYO

Wed, 10 Sep 2014 20:39:01 +1000

While Nico, Jake and Michael are busy at Fantastic Arcade in Austin next week, Stu is flying to Tokyo to exhibit Push Me Pull You at the Tokyo Game Show, where we’ve been invited to present as a featured game in Sense of Wonder Night.

We’ll have a booth in the Indie Game Area set up throughout TGS from September 18th - 21st. If you’re in Tokyo, come say hi! Here’s an extremely arcane map to help you find us:

PMPY at Fantastic Arcade!

Wed, 03 Sep 2014 11:12:00 +1000

We are super pleased to announce that Push Me Pull You is a spotlight game in this year’s Fantastic Arcade!

As a spotlight game, PMPY will be playable in a custom arcade cabinet(!!!), and there will be an official tournament to find out who are the very best friends in Austin. Fantastic Arcade runs September 18-22 in Austin, Texas. Jake, Nico and Michael will be there in person, so if you are coming to the Arcade, make sure you come and say hi to us.