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[richardboeser]

Hi there,

Last september I graduated on the design of "ibb and obb", a two-player cooperative platformgame with a twist.



There is no playable version online, but you can see what it is about at:
http://www.ibbandobb.com

All comments and suggestions are very welcome.

have fun,
Richard Boeser

[Saint]

You might want to introduce yourself to avoid coming off as if you're just posting on random forums to pimp your game, that is kind of frowned upon here.

That being said, I really like the look of the game and the gameplay seems pretty cool. I can see some risks with having the game two-player-only and if you don't introduce enough new elements as the game goes on it might become stale, but that's of course impossible to tell without seeing any levels beyond the first one.

[richardboeser]

You might want to introduce yourself to avoid coming off as if you're just posting on random forums to pimp your game, that is kind of frowned upon here.

hmmm good point, I sort of jumped in from nowhere, hadn't thought of that.
As for the pimping my game part. I am looking for attention for the game, but mostly because I'd like some feedback. This is my first attempt at game-design, I studied industrial design and this is the final result of my graduation project. I'm not surrounded by people with a lot of knowledge on the subject. So most comments I get are in the line of:"yeah I like it", which is nice, but it won't improve the game concept. So I came here.
Please frown gently.

I can see some risks with having the game two-player-only

I chose to do it this way bacause I think there are too few cooperative games. And I really like the idea of people playing together and them being in the same room.
If you look at it from a commercial point of view, this might not be a smart choice. A game that can only be played with two is for a lot of people not interesting to buy.
But for this project my aim was to create some fresh gameplay and most design choices were made on that idea.

if you don't introduce enough new elements as the game goes on it might become stale

I agree. I have a lot of ideas for other levels, but the question is whether the core mechanism is interesting enough to keep you playing.

Thanks for the comments.

[Headmade]

I find it interesting that you have filmed your play testers. Could you talk a little about the process and especially what you have learned from it.

The game looks really nice and polished but it seems to lack goals. Collecting diamonds for the sake of collecting diamonds is usually not interesting enough to make anyone do this longer than a couple of minutes. Give the player a good reason to collect diamonds (like gaining new abilities).
Once you have that covered more enemies and more diversity in general would probably a good idea. The core mechanic seems solid enough to me.

[richardboeser]

I find it interesting that you have filmed your play testers.

I filmed the testers because I wanted to see (and show) how they interact. I wanted to create a game which would make for a rich interaction between the players. When players solve a puzzle together they share a feeling of accomplishment. But they will also get annoyed with eachother from time to time if one of them messes up. I wanted the players to be able to tease eachother a bit, so I allowed for shooting eachother, which doesn't kill you but it'll put you of flying. Players liked to do this, especially after all the happy friendly working together.

Could you talk a little about the process

A short summery of the design process:

- Find out why people play games.
- Find out what makes a game fun.
- Formulate a design process which is focussed on making a game fun to play.

// start of design process

- The search for a good starting point. Experiment with very basic game mechanisms. Experiment more. And more.
- From here I followed a very iterative process, continuously building and adjusting the game, from a very basic core mechanism (double gravity) to a prototype with a more complete set of game elements.
During this iterative process I had a lot of people trying out the game. Most of them inexperienced players, so I could see what ideas they understood from the start. I wanted the game to be really easy to start playing with.
- Finally I spent time on polishing the game a bit. Worked on the graphics added some sounds (still crappy though) and removed the bugs.

With the final prototype a did some more testing (of which you saw the clip).

and especially what you have learned from it.

So many things, but I'll stick to the core.
Games are artificial sets of rules and goals. We accept these rules as being true as long as we play a game. We create these artificial spaces to challenge ourselves, and more specifically, we want challenges that give us satisfaction by the progress we make in them. The challenge shouldn't be to easy for you won't notice progress if you're already able to do it in the first place. The challenge shouldn't be to hard for you won't notice any progress within a reasonable amount of time.
Noticing the progress (or learning) is what our brain likes, it rewards us with a pleasent feeling, the fun in games.
(In this I found the following books most useful: Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens and Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun for Game Design)

This core idea can help you in a lot of game design decisions. But there are ofcourse more things to take into account, like styling and quite important the social interaction between players.

Let me get to the part about the diamonds later, have to get some work done.

Richard

[moshboy]

I really liked the look of this and I think the gameplay mechanics show a lot of potential.. my personal suggestion to please as many people as possible would be to add a single player mode that would work in a similar way to The Lost Vikings (use one character to do something, switch to the other character to do the other thing required to help out the first character). A lot of people will miss out on this, simply because they have no-one that would be interested in playing alongside them (that includes myself, since my gf only likes the casual match-3 clones and my other friends don't like 2d games period). And I don't want to miss out on this because it looks pretty awesome.

[medieval]

Looks like a great concept from the videos, but I can't judge about any downsides until I'd actually test play it  (btw, I assume you are Dutch? ik namelijk ook)

[richardboeser]

but it seems to lack goals. Collecting diamonds for the sake of collecting diamonds is usually not interesting enough to make anyone do this longer than a couple of minutes. Give the player a good reason to collect diamonds (like gaining new abilities).

About the diamonds

The main goal in the game is not to collect the diamonds it is to get to the end of each level. A very non-original, but very effective goal. For some reason there is always a princess to be saved and she always happens to be somewhere to the right of the screen. Since this goal has been used so very often it is also recognised by a lot of non-gamers. And didn't tell any of my test players what they were supposed to do.

So what about those diamonds? I introduced the diamonds to reward the players for cooperating smoothly. I noticed that without the diamonds the players were less focused on working well together. I added an extra goal to see if I could change that. The diamonds work in three ways:

- they appear whenever you kill an enemy. But they appear on the other side of the world. This means that to collect them one player kills the enemy while the other collects the bonus on the other side. The diamonds disappear after bouncing around a little, so you have to be quick and know what the other player is doing.

- there is a bunch of diamonds at each end of a level. But they are slowly floating away. This means that the faster you play, the more diamonds are left at the end of the level. To play fast you have to work together well.

- there are big diamonds which trigger temporary rain of diamonds. These are hidden of in locations which require certain skills to get there. This adds some extra puzzle elements to the levels.

The amount of diamonds you collect indicates how well you played together. For example, most starting couples collected around 40 diamonds, the first time through the level and spend upto 20 minutes getting there. After a few sessions they got to about 120 diamonds and a time near 5 minutes. The level can be played collecting around 270 diamonds and finishing in under 1.5 minutes.

I agree that collecting diamonds should reward the player with something else then just points. My idea is to allow higher scoring players to move to other levels, take shortcuts. Something like that should work.

Interesting to note was that though the diamonds had no clear goal in my prototype all couples collected them vigorously. There was no score vissible during the level, no other changes, nothing, they just wanted to collect them. I guess everyone likes shiny things.

thanks for all the comments sofar,
Richard

[princec]

Beautiful style - most original looking style I've seen for a while. Don't take any notice of the "don't post here to spam your game" types, I bet there'll be a huge pile of noses on the floor and spited faces around here one day. Will try it out when I've finished work.

Cas

[richardboeser]

my personal suggestion to please as many people as possible would be to add a single player mode that would work in a similar way to The Lost Vikings

ofcourse the first question should be, do I really want to please as much people as possible. And is making a single player mode the best way of doing that? I could also put more time in making the two player game more interesting. I won't please as many people as possible, but a few people as much as possible.

But I don't know, it could work for one player aswell. The double gravity system works fine like that, but I would leave out the second player and focus on what I could do with one.

[richardboeser]

Looks like a great concept from the videos, but I can't judge about any downsides until I'd actually test play it  (btw, I assume you are Dutch? ik namelijk ook)

Hmmm I should make a downloadable something. The prototype is a UnrealTournament2004 mod, and it needs an extra little program if you want to run it with two joypads. You can ofcourse play with keyboard.

En inderdaad Nederlands

groeten
Richard

[Agh]

I think it could be possible to play the game as a single player.
the controls for ibb would be the cursor-keys, and for obb wasd.
up makes you jump and down makes your character shoot (and vice-versa in the upside-down zone).
Of course this would be hard and depending on how complex the later levels are it could be impossible...it's hard to judge when you didn't play the game.

[Golds]

I really like the style of the game...  this is an an Unreal Tournament mod?


It would be nice to have some gameplay obstacles or entities of varying scale in the game.  As it standas right now, everything is small and relatively the same size on screen.  It would be nice to go up against obstacles of differing size to give some variety.

[Xion]

I think it could be possible to play the game as a single player.
the controls for ibb would be the cursor-keys, and for obb wasd.
up makes you jump and down makes your character shoot (and vice-versa in the upside-down zone).
Of course this would be hard and depending on how complex the later levels are it could be impossible...it's hard to judge when you didn't play the game.

I think most people aren't that coordinated. Unless you're some kind of...supercoordinated freak of coordinature.
Anyway, this game looks really wonderful so far, and I'm loving the idea.

[zradick]

I can dig it!  Lots of good ideas there.  I like the use of gravity and the inversion of it around the floor/ceiling.  I agree that making it two-player only will limit the uptake a bit, but for the cooperative niche it seems like it could be fun (of course being a mod to a game I don't have it is hard to say).  My wife and I played Lego StarWars : The Original Trilogy on the PC using XBOX 360 controllers and had a great time with it.  If you haven't played that, it's definitely instructive as to what makes a platformer fun for many different audiences.

Cheers!
--Zack

[richardboeser]

I'm really liking all the feedback and suggestions here, thanks

Let's see...

I think it could be possible to play the game as a single player.
the controls for ibb would be the cursor-keys, and for obb wasd.
up makes you jump and down makes your character shoot (and vice-versa in the upside-down zone).

Well it is possible because that is how I played it a lot during development. But it does hurt your brain and takes too much time getting used to. Though it does feel like you're training your multitasking capabilities.

It would be nice to have some gameplay obstacles or entities of varying scale in the game.  As it standas right now, everything is small and relatively the same size on screen.  It would be nice to go up against obstacles of differing size to give some variety.

This sounds really good to me. Right now there is no difference in scale throughout the world and it would be really nice to get that in the game. Nice, thanks

---------------

A bit more about why it is a unrealTournament2004 mod, because that might not make a lot of sense.

An important part of my project was trying to find ideas for new game-mechanics through experimenting/playing. To do this I needed something to play with and which I could modify.
I started out with the halflife2 engine and tried some modding for that. I am not a programmer (I do have quite some experience in actionscript, but C is a whole other story) and the modding for halflife was to difficult for me. I switched to the Unreal Engine which was a lot easier to get into. So I started experimenting with that.
At a certain time I got the idea for the reversed gravity thing, and build a first prototype in Unreal.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-727767723466237394&hl=en
From there on the prototype kept on being developed using UnrealTournament.

If you look at the game now you would not choose to develop it as a UT2004 mod. And I don't want to continue developing it like that. So right now I'm sort of stuck. I could port it to Flash. Which would be nice because then I could let everyone play it. But the game is more suited for being played on the couch with a friend in front of your tv set. Meaning, in most cases, on a console. But that's a whole different story.

So what do I do now?

[zradick]

Something like this would make a great fit for XBOX Live Arcade.  One of my co-workers was playing around with the dev kit for it and you can make stuff to play yourself, but I have no idea how you go about getting it into the actual arcade for everyone to purchase...  And you'd probably need to make it work for single player somehow...  Perhaps you could use the two analog sticks to control the two characters and use the two triggers for jump (so you would essentially have the left side stick and left trigger for one character and the right side stick and right trigger for the other).  That might be just funky enough to be fun...

[moshboy]

I say if you have the abilities to port it to flash (keeping the same mechanics and feel), then please do so..

[Headmade]

First thanks for your elaborate answer.
About Flash... I'm no Flash expert but I don't think it supports controller input. Forcing both users to use one keyboard may not be the best decision.
If this is a point you want to take into consideration and don't mind learning a few new things you could check out pygame. From my experience it is relatively easy to learn and use. Of course there are alternatives too.

[richardboeser]

Something like this would make a great fit for XBOX Live Arcade.

Good idea. I'm looking into it now and it seems like a great match.
http://www.microsoftcasualgames.msn.com/developers_xla.htm

That all doesn't sound to bad right?

Perhaps you could use the two analog sticks to control the two characters and use the two triggers for jump (so you would essentially have the left side stick and left trigger for one character and the right side stick and right trigger for the other).  That might be just funky enough to be fun...

Sounds like a good configuration, but controlling both at the same time is pretty difficult stuff I must say. But you could start of easy and slowly train the player into multiprocessing.

------------

About Flash... I'm no Flash expert but I don't think it supports controller input. Forcing both users to use one keyboard may not be the best decision.
If this is a point you want to take into consideration and don't mind learning a few new things you could check out pygame. From my experience it is relatively easy to learn and use. Of course there are alternatives too.

The good thing about flash would be that everyone could easily try it online. A downside being the keyboardcontroll.
I guess I should first decide on the platform before I start doing more developing. Sofar XBOX Live Arcade sounds good to me. I'll look into that further and keep you guys posted.