Fill your bar before your opponent, but be careful not to leave yourself open to attack!

Bar for Bar is one of three mobile games I developed for my portfolio project at Falmouth. The main design aim here was to keep it simple, focusing on building tools to make my job easier in the next projects - So I decided to make a game that took full advantage of the new UI components I was building.

I started with the humble progress bar. A UI element that can either be full, empty, or somewhere in-between; the simplest representation of a number between two extents; and yet it's been used to represent life experience, physical wellbeing, progress towards a goal and much, much more.

Moreover, I figured that an empty bar presents a clear goal to the player: Fill it up! Therefore, two players are tasked with the goal of filling their bar up first, and utilised my newly-coded multi-touch input to bind tapping, holding and releasing to different actions. Finally I came up with a set of actions that would balance each other out, drawing from the "Slap Game" of my schoolhood days:

Tap - Attack (damage the other player and gain progress if they aren't Blocking)

Hold - Fill (fill up your progress bar)

Release - Block (slowly lose progress, but gain progress if Attacked)