For a midterm project by Richard Jungkunz at the KISD we had to develop a casual game. Because we're at a design school and we don't have huge programming skills we focused on the visual part of the game. The goal was to show the idea behind it and how the game could work if it was real.

I think everybody knows the feeling when you're sitting in a barber shop and you're scared that your ear might be chopped off every moment. So we came up with the idea of a drunk barber who is doing this all day long to his customers.

Because the barber is drunk, he is moving constantly from the left to the right and swings his arm with the scissor from the top to the bottom. The goal of the game is to cut off as much hair as possible without hurting the customer. When he has lost his ears and nose, it's game over.

The game was created for smartphones so the only thing you have to do to let the scissor snap is just tapping on your screen.

To get a better feeling of the concept you can watch this trailer:

We decided that the customer should have four different expressions.

So I had to create the so called "sprite sheets" to get the animation working in Unity, the program where we built the actual game in.

And don't be confused about the fact that the customer has no nose or ears. It's because we wanted to make it possible that you can chop off these parts as well, so we placed them over this layer in Unity.

1st row: Here you can see an ongoing animation: This is shown after a few seconds or between different animations.

2nd row: The character is getting scared when the scissor is too close to the nose or the ears and this animation shows up.

3rd row: This animation is triggered by cutting the hair and nothing else.

(middle) Here you can see all animations combined into one GIF.

(left & right) The first layer of hair is split into many pieces, so you can trim the hair wherever you want without cutting off the entire hair. Under this layer there is the final haircut.

These are all the layers we used for the game. (Background, barber, customer, barber's hand & foreground)

We had to find a way how the barber could reach all the areas which can be cut off around the customers' head.

The barber constantly has to slide from the right to the left, while his left arm rotates. To simplifiy the work we kept the arm rigid. Additionally the body rotated a little bit to imitate a tumbling of the barber. That way, the scissors which are attached to the Hand of the barber hovers over the customers' face and is able to reach all hair parts, the ears and the nose.

The next step was to create the „cutoff“ mechanic. With the help of the plugin I made it so, that an „event“ is being send when the player clicks: PlayerClicked. This event is sent to all game objects. If this happens, the game objects (hair Party, ears and nose) check whether the scissors are in their respective hitbox (collider). If this is the case, the respective object does his individual event „cutted“, which lets them bounce to the side and then decay (sometimes it still bugs).