Project First Steps

 


Project First Steps

Ideation.

when thinking of a multiplayer game, I automatically think about the other players as the main mechanic, as the something extra that makes the game interesting.
For making the human part with the most impact as possible, we wanted the player to both cooperate with a human and compete with a human, so some sort of co-op PvP.
to make the cooperation as meaningful as possible we wanted to make the players dependent on one another in some way. I thought about rally racers as an inspiration, for 2 people with very different capabilities and roles that depend on each other in order to to achieve their common goal. 
we where then trying to take inspiration of other cooperation multiplayer games like "It Takes Two" and "Operation Tango". i thought of a concept to maximize the dependency of the players on each other. lets say the game objective of the game is to collect coins, what if one player could see but couldn't collect it while the other one could collect it but couldn't see it. The idea was well received by the group and we started to develop it. 

Core Gameplay.

so the concept is that each team need to rush and collect their assigned coins before any other team does. To make it more interesting and add a risk element we added mines that explode and throw the player away. So the team needs to be careful by collecting only their own allocated coins, because a wrong collectible could either be a mine that throws you away, either an enemy coin that will help the enemy team to get closer to victory. 
since all teams share the same map we want them to interact with each other, trying to slow down and sabotage in the enemies team road to success. For this purpose we added a simple fighting mechanic which will include melee attacks that can disable a player for a short period of time.
the player who collects the coins could see all the collectibles on the map, but couldn't distinguish what is what, and will need the other players guidance to succeed in the collecting task. 
To give the player who sees more power we decided to make him an entity in top down view with special abilities to interact with the world and help is teammate from a different point of view, and sabotage the other teams. 
After a talk with Vasileios, the game was too much based on communication, and it could create a big disadvantage to an uncommunicating team, we needed to find a way to balance the win probability between directly communicating players, to players who have no direct channel of communication. 
For that purpose we decided to remove the vision element, and make both player equal not distinguishing between the collectibles. Which mean we will need to embed a way of reviling the "identity" of the collectibles in their abilities, reducing their dependability on each other.

Game World

physiques- when the gameplay started to become clear, we saw a lot of potential in the physical slapsticks comedy of this game and to get the most out of it we should make the characters kind of flailing ragdolls like in the games “Gang Beasts” and “Human Fall Flat” and “Party animals”.





for the game world itself I imagined the characters being animals collecting their food, (mouse - cheese, dog - bones, etc) and in a world like that the top down player will actually be the pet owner from the pets perspective. a big force from the sky, that helps them but is unexplainable.













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