The Importance of Balance
In terms of the Space theme being introduced, the idea was to create something relatively realistic so giving the basic context of the game. This transformed the Main Players to become humans and the Sub-Players to be Aliens having some type of conflict between the two. So as a basic game mechanic, we have one force that needs to attack to go further and the other has to defend. The Attack force needs to go through the platforming sections, whilst the Aliens will have influence over the environment.
You could say that Aliens are defending their home planet. NOW THERE’S AT LEAST A THEME AND A CONCEPT. Additionally, these Aliens would need to know how they can transform the environment so they would also need characters they can control.
Conditions
But how can each party win and lose? We decided on certain conditions that need to met in the game:
Life bar, this should be separated for each Human rather than being shared. The Humans will have limited amount of Lives so once they are all gone, they can no longer play. The Aliens would not have this restriction leading on to the next point….
There will be a time limit for the Humans to reach Point B from Point A, making sure game a not to long-winded.
To put it basically, Human will win once they reach the objective, Aliens would win if they successfully stop the Humans from reaching their objective either by the timer or they run out health.
Abilities
Going over what both of these teams can do there has been a slight change in how it’s been telegraphed, rather the Aliens are against the Humans and the Humans have their own select skills they can perform instead, whilst the Aliens will have a certain abilities that they have to work together to stop the Humans.
Each Human should have one ability to work with that complement each other, but they have to be different so the solution for this, because we are in space, make them have telepathic abilities, because it sounds cool, obviously I need to would need to create a narrative to support this, but we move.
However, the Aliens would need to have a few, they are after all trying to prevent the Humans from getting to their objective after all. So what can they do:
This is the Aliens’ home planet, so maybe they are able to influence things in the level or even make dungeons along the way
Maybe being able to contact their friends, in order to go to war with the incoming humans so spawning those enemies
As they are Aliens, they might have technology that can help them stop the Humans from getting to their objective or slow them down, maybe Gravity influenced.
Also these Aliens need to be active participants in the game, the Aliens and Humans shouldn’t be in direct contact with each other at all, so in this case the Aliens should be floating above the map. So now when designing this, the only way I will know of the implications and how effective some things need to be to make it good for both teams.