Players and Spectators

As stated earlier, with the ‘Spectators’ they need to be an influence on the environment that the two other players will be playing in, for now they will be called ‘Sub-players’ to avoid confusion. But the idea was to make these Sub-player provide power ups or downs to the other player that have a simple goal.

The main players aim is the co-operate together and make sure they can survive effectively and with the abstract understanding of what they need to do, how can we enforce a more solid “genre” on what they need to do, like what is the context?

Research

With the general concept down we then needed to start to understand what type of game uses this type of mechanic, so we could refine the ideas more coherently, allowing the environment to become the middle man of interaction between the players at least in theory. With the asymmetric design, it’s effectively like making two games, as there will be different playstyles at least between 3 people.

To produce that better understanding we looked into a lot of different games, as we had to figure out what the Co-op player were gonna do, and then the sub-player were gonna do. These are the things we looked into:

• Crawl

Interestingly this game is a dungeon where you have to be the last man standing between friends and you have to navigated to the end goal and beat the boss. Once your friends (or should I say enemies) die, they are reborn as Ghosts to haunt you during your journey to the end. So the Ghosts become ‘Sub players’ where they are still are actively influencing the game following you around and try to find methods to kill you so they can claim your place, it’s a never-ending cycle of who is to become number 1. Everyone starts off as the main player where they can die in one hit, and the last person is standing is able to leave the first room, once the other player who died come back as Ghosts they are able throw objects around found in each room, or spawn back as specific enemies they can control, or other enemies to slow down the progress of the player to basically kill him. This is a good example of what our sub-player should be able to do to our main players within this game.

But what time of game do we want to make for the main players? Do we want a fast action based game like this, or something that requires strategy to progress. What I believed should have been done here for progress is to know the answer to that question. What is the genre of the game?

• Nintendo Land

Next we looked into what the Main Players should be doing, now the game doesn’t have to be devoid of any action based segments but to make it easier to understand for players within the game, making a platformer can make provides a simpler method of play in this game, firstly we looked into team based platforming games and Nintendo Land being one of them, but more specifically the Pikmin Adventure. The main features that was noticed is how each player collaborates with each other, 3 of them all have the same function to attack and jump, but the one player in this case ‘The Captain’ can call all of them over regardless of what they are doing, but is unable to jump, he can still attack, but it only effects the blocks in the environment, not the enemies. So ‘The Captain needs these other players to help through the environment. The controls are simple, engaging and most importantly have a very distinctive aim on what the players need to accomplish, getting from Point A to Point B. Additionally, they need to find the ? block to help them proceed through each section otherwise they are unable to get through.

• Lego Games (Star Wars)

From there how should these abilities should be created by looking at the old Lego Games, there is a definitive pattern that each character that you can play in the level has a distinctive function to what they can do, whether it be extremely specific or have multiples uses, for example in this playthrough when you see the player changing from one of the Jedi characters to a Droid. The Droid is the only character that can open the door and has no combat ability, but the Jedi has combat ability with a different skill which can do other things.

Taking heavy inspiration from these games it started to shape that we would be making a platformer that has some action based mechanics along with some basic puzzle solving along the way incorporating what we have already established on. Came down to what these people could do?

We looked in other places as well which can be seen down below:

Ideation

Eventually during this time we started to developed an idea of what we wanted in terms of the context. We collectively decided on the theme of Space. Then we started ideating what these people should be able to do, so then we made another brainstorm (I know you are a fan of these):

Next Steps

Now it’s time to decide a few things, how can each person Win the Game, and how they can lose. Once that has been decided we can move on to further developing the themes.