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For our first Game Project in Future Games, I took on the roles of Gameplay Designer and Sound Designer. We had 2 weeks to come up with a game involving the theme of future mobility whilst having the game be catered to an audience of 8 to 12-year-olds. Another challenging aspect was the fact we had to make the controls be suitable for the Xbox Adaptive Controller

After an initial team meeting, we decided to make a co-op game inspired by It Takes Two and Overcooked since we wanted to promote communication between the youngsters and we thought these two games made great use of that. Our game would consist of two players riding on a scooter delivering rechargeable batteries; one player would drive the scooter while the other would deliver the items. Since we could have two adaptive controllers, each player would have one, using the two big A / B buttons to steer and switch - and using A + B to jump and throw the batteries.

As I decided to focus on gameplay, I quickly went to work the following morning by creating a prototype of what we had discussed in order to present in the morning meeting to make sure we were all on the same page regarding 3C’s.

While the project evolved and the programmers took over the code, I worked closely on the player movement since we wanted to make the vehicle scooter feel comfortable but also not too easy to handle, since this could potentially make the player driver more boring than the deliverer.

first playable build

After a lot of playtesting, I realized that the scooter movement would stop the moment the player released the input button, causing an unnatural feeling + making it easy for the player to reach their goal.

To solve this issue, I asked the programmers to implement acceleration and deceleration to the movement, adding a little more difficulty to the player responsible for movement, which would equal the level of concentration needed to perform both roles. I then proceeded to tweak the numbers on Unity reiteratively until I (and subsequently the team) was content with the result.

I then brought this up in a meeting to discuss which should we aim for, while having a tier list for definite ones and other ones we could add depending on time constraints. In the end, we only used the one that freezes the player - mostly due to time constraints.

Having to use the Xbox Adaptive Controller, accessibility was something that we discussed many times. Once we decided the colors of the batteries the player would deliver I took some time to research how these colors would affect colorblind people.

I approached the team with a palette that would result in little to no issue for people with different types of colour blindness. I also suggested having the player be green to further help with this.

When the time for audio and music came, I made sure to communicate properly with the programmers to see how they wanted to handle the implementation, since it would require me to touch their code. In the end, I accepted their request to keep away from the code, so I used a sheet document with detailed information about where to implement each line of code so there wouldn’t be any confusion. This ended up working flawlessly.

cross disciplinary communication

Since we were fairly new at FutureGames and no one wanted to step on each others’ toes, we let each other have a lot of room to work with - working with what people felt comfortable and desired.

This resulted in the vision of the game being inconsistent between team members. While the designers and programmers agreed on the idea of having batteries be deliverable to people’s homes, the artists decided to create miniature characters in a big world - meaning the players would ride the scooter through rocks, grass, and dirt - à la Grounded.

Naturally, this caused a disconnection between the in-game world and story and the actual gameplay (are we delivering batteries to rocks and grass?). Unfortunately with only 2 weeks time, we had to settle with the assets we were given by the art team

Therefore I decided to be more present in other disciplines in further projects and so made sure to keep communication channels open and constant in order to avoid these mistakes in the future

While the mid-way choice of changing the delivery zones was a positive one in terms of fun, it also caused a lot of setbacks. Moreso, in the final build players don’t actually shoot batteries, but rather different colored shapes. This is a result of having specific meshes for the batteries not being able to be implemented on time. This was a good lesson on scoping and where to put our attention with proper time management.