This is a prototype created to find the direction for my Junior Team's next project. The only design prompt given by the team was to create a multiplayer arena game.

KickPuncher is a 2D Beat 'em Up. It's about four people on three floors left to do one thing, kick a lot of butts. A new wave of bad guys spawn every round. The players must kick all the dudes out in the short amount of time given or they risk failure.

My goal was was to create an emergent cooperative mechanic. When a player performs their primary kick action on an enemy it becomes stunned, knocked back, and loses a health point; inversely the enemy becomes temporarily invulnerable to the last kicker. This artificially strung out how much time it would take for one player to kick out one enemy. The strategy I wanted players to discover is that to quickly dispatch enemies, it is efficient for two players to volley an enemy back and forth, rather than playing separately.