throughtheloop.strangeloopgames.comThrough the Loop

A blog about the future of gameplay Perseverance: Co-op Puzzle Game I went to the ‘House of Games’ game jam this weekend and ended up creating something pretty interesting with some pretty talented people there. We decided on a genre of games that I think is somehow one of the least common and yet easiest to make something interesting: the multiplayer puzzle game. Our game is called Life Line, and is a co-op game featuring two rock climbers connected by a rope. The rope functions as the main mechanic of the game, and if one player falls the other can grip tightly to the rock (by mashing the A button), allowing the other player to swing from them until they get their grip. Dangle too long from your buddy, and he loses his grip and you both fall to your doom. It’s all for one and one for all. Not surprisingly, my coding contribution in the 28 hour project was the dynamic rope physics and player movement, which was a lot of fun to implement and I think has a potential that is only hinted at in this video. I can imagine taking this mechanic to all kinds of logical extremes – tying the fate of two players together figuratively and very literally, and yet using that interplay to increase the reach of the team beyond the sum of the two individuals. In the video you can see how we used this: one player can climb to a certain height, while the other one jumps off the rock and uses the rope anchored to his buddy to swing to an otherwise inaccessible rock while the anchored played mashes A for dear life. I’d like to push this mechanic further, and might do that with a future project. Some ideas: How would this work with 4 players, each chained to the next in turn? Could get some really complex/interesting acrobatics. Life Line as a mobile game. I’m picturing a multiplayer Temple-Run style game, where all 2/3/4 players are continuously climbing up along different tracks, and players can jump off the rock by swiping left or right, and if your buddy is dangling from you, you survive by tapping the screen to grip the rock. The multiplayer infinite runner, I think it could really work. Would need to support seamless matchmaking and easy ways to play with friends on a single device, via bluetooth, or over an internet connection. With the right amount of polish and a casual, cheeky flair (like Ski Safari with its Sasquatch vehicles) I could see the game taking off. We need a ‘cut the rope’ button because it’s just such an emotional moment to have to cut your buddy loose when he’s dangling from you and you have no other choice. Push this button and be haunted forever. What else could be done with this? Lots I think. Here’s the windows executable if you want to try it. Use two controls, or keys: Player 1:Arrows to move, Space to grip, Enter to release Player 2: WASD to move, E to grip, Q to release http://private.strangeloopgames.com/LIFELINE%20-%20Final%20Gamejam%20Build.zip 1 Comment by John K. on October 29, 2013 • Permalink Posted in Uncategorized Posted by John K. on October 29, 2013 http://throughtheloop.strangeloopgames.com/perseverance-co-op-puzzle-game/ One response to Perseverance: Co-op Puzzle Game” Evan Witt says: October 29, 2013 at 6:00 pm Nice write-up of the work, John. I was surprised at how interesting this mechanic turned out to be (considering the short dev time), but I think what really makes it work is the constant requirement of actively putting your success into your partner’s hands (whenever you jump). A lot of co-op games have fairly passive interdependence, like needing your teammates to revive you whenever you get hit, etc, but I think this has a nice twist to it (he he). That said, I’m not convinced it could work for more than two players. Hmmm… I’d need to think about it a little. Reply Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * Comment Name * Email * Website Real Crime in Virtual Worlds What are the stories of the every day world that most interest us? Turning on the TV we can see it on the news: car chases, pursuits, shootouts, crime and punishment, justice served or not. It strikes me how little events like these affect the lives of their onlookers, and how that contrasts to the huge amount of attention they receive. Why is this case? It’s spectacle. It’s excitement, danger, horror, suspense, mystery, tragedy. It’s all the elements we see in movies and stories, enacted live on television in front of us. For better or worse, it captures people, their sympathies and angers, their rapt attention. It’s an event of note, because it’s uncommon and affects lives profoundly, it’s society going off the rails, a life skating along the abyss as it breaks all the rules, on its way to ruin with all the powers of society in hot pursuit, flared up to defeat the abomination. We cant look away. The pull of events like this are so strong they retain their interest even when fictionalized. A huge portion of stories (and one might argue all stories, in a more abstract sense) are about this – transcending, breaking the rules, stepping outside the norm. The ‘hero’s journey’, the monomyth that fits so many stories, always has the hero enter that special world, and things are never the same. And video games too play this theme, probably more blatantly than any other medium. The car chase, the shoot-up, the defeat of the giant beast that threatens the world. Breaking the rules of society, defending a land in peril, transcending, events worthy of a story. Only, not. They’re all false. In video games, shoot-ups are the rule, there is no society to transcend. The events that happen in a game are exactly what’s meant to happen, they’ve been tested thousands of times by a team shooting the same triggered baddies with the same virtual bullets. It’s rote, it’s illusion. At the end of a quest in the ‘Star Wars: The Old Republic’ I defeated a magnificent monster threatening the world, only to stroll out of the cave past a queue of adventures heading in to defeat that same boss, respawned. Of course we know its an illusion, and we accept that games must (like with movies or books) require our suspension of disbelief in order for them to perform their magic on us. Or must they? What if we didn’t have to create these false worlds, primed for explosions? What if these events were actual, real things happening in a virtual world? What if a crime spree was more than a pre-programmed sequence of events designed to give the illusion of an exciting chase (cue gunships to enter at the third checkpoint), what if crimes in games were real , they affected real lives, they were perpetrated by real people breaking real rules, and the heroes that pursued these criminals were actual heroes, truly protecting a virtual world? It’s possible, and it’s where I think games are ready to go. The entire concept of real crime in a virtual game hinges on a couple of factors. First, how can crime be real in a virtual world? The answer is that although such a world is virtual, the value created inside it is not; it has tangible worth outside the game world. This is evident when one considers the gold farmers of WoW and real-world markets for games like Diablo. If there is real value in a virtual good, there can be real crime when it is stolen. The second factor is the concept of rules, aka laws. Creating a game is not like creating a society, it’s more like creating a universe: You’re inventing the very laws of physics. If you want to make it physically impossible to pickpocket, it’s easily done. If a virtual world is programmed to not allow theft between players, that is not a societal construct, that’s a physical law of nature. To create a society, you need to have two layers of rules, what is possible and what is acceptable . You can only create a society if you create rules that can be broken. This distinction of rules is extremely important in a game and so often the two are confused, no distinction is made: Stealing is not allowed in...