CGD: Week 1 and 2 Recap
Our team had a very productive first two weeks planning our multiplayer game. After looking at some of the last year’s project examples, and discussing which games excite us most, we decided on creating a 4-player cooperative puzzle game in a fantasy setting.
We did a bunch of research on games like Portal, It takes two, Overcooked, and even Left 4 Dead; but funnily enough, the key source of inspiration for me ended up being Fireboy and Watergirl. It might be an old flash game I played all the way back in middle school, but its concept of players having different elemental abilities and thus different strategies of approaching each level while needing to work together to succeed is still uniquely interesting to me.
That inspired our main concept: a puzzle game for four players with different elemental abilities, who must work together to complete each level. But then our Prof brought up a great question: well, how do the players even lose? That stumped us a little. We had come up with a fun concept to play with, but a key element was missing - the stakes. We had two options: set a time limit for the players, or populate the level with AI enemies. We knew from our lectures that the AI was the weakest part of a single-player game, so we were very reluctant to add basic enemies to the level. But how to make sure that the time limit option doesn’t seem arbitrary or out of place? This problem, like many problems, was solved with a good story. I came up with a harrowing tale of the guardians of the forest, 4 heroes who had fallen trying to protect their home from a mysterious assailant and left their weapons behind. Our 4 players would find the weapons and the trail of destruction reaching deep into the heart of the forest, and decide to carry on the mantle of the guardians, saving their home before it was too late.
This sounded good and all, but the game had now become a long, story-driven role-playing game, which was not ideal for our module. Each level had to take at most 10 minutes, and that did not seem realistic in this scenario. So, we went back to the drawing board.
We needed to shrink the story into bite-sized pieces, a beginning-climax-end to each level that would entertain and motivate the player without becoming the main focus. Our teammate then came up with a story set around a cult, whose followers are trying to collect ancient artifacts to sacrifice them to their god. They would need to solve ancient mysteries to undo the protections cast on each artifact, and, in a shocking twist, one of their fellow cultists would actually be working against them to try to hinder their progress. Thus, the new concept was born - an asymmetric puzzle and object collection game, where 3 players are working against 1 to reach their goal.
