next »

[Sushin00]

Right now I'm turning my single player game into a two player (optional) game, and one of the design issues I'm facing is, if I have rooms where encounters happen, and I lock the players in the room until the encounter is over, how do I get both players in the room when one of them triggers the encounter?

My first idea was something Halo-esque where the player who didn't trigger the encounter will teleport to the player that did. That would be easy, but I want to avoid apparently spontaneous teleports. I had some more ideas but some of them are more difficult to implement than others.


So I wanted to ask, is there any obvious, elegant design solution to this that I'm unaware of?

[Valakanaraga]

If you don't mind telegraphing the fact that the players are about to enter a room which is going to lock them in it you could make a gate/teleporter/airlock/GENRE_APPROPRIATE_PASSAGEWAY which requires all players to stand by it before it is made traversable. If one player passes through it the game transitions to the next screen.

[Hipshot]

I don't think you should force a player teleporting when they don't choose to, even if they need to do that.

I don't like events where you need to wait for all players to be in the room before starting, when you have a story and you want some proper pacing, so my solution is very meta, I just place a teleport outside the room, a marker with "ui" graphics kinda, not something that fits into the environment. This is done in many games I've noted.

[randomThrowAway]

An obvious (not sure about elegant) solution would be not allowing players to stray too far from each other in the first place.

[JindrichP]

I don´t know your exact situation, but I imagine something like a room where will be a boss fight that starts when you do something (step on a rune, pull a trigger etc.). In that case I would say that the best solution is to make trigger triggerable only when two players trigger it.

[DrCosmic]

I'm not sure if Elegant, but a quick animation of the distant player rushing into the room before it closed could soften the jarring-nature of the teleport. Other than that you'll need to make doors require both people to be there.

[G-Factor]

If you don't mind a "gamey" solution.

The encounter only starts when both players have entered or are in the room. It either starts automatically, or a player has to interact with something. If option 2 (for example pulling a lever) then perhaps you can show a short message for both players.

Player 1 - Player 2 must be present to start this event.
Player 2 - Player 1 wants to start an event. Teleport there now? (YES/NO)

Depending on the type of game you can allow/disallow teleporting. In my opinion;

Action/hack and slash...etc = Allow teleporting.
Horror/survival = Don't allow teleporting. Everyone needs to make it there on their own.

[Oats]

Do encounters have both players? What if the doors of an encounter room where 1-way until the encounter was beat, so players could come into the room anytime, but could only leave when the encounter was over. Then when one player enters the room they play it by themselves, but the other player can enter any time and join in.
This makes cooperation a choice rather then mandatory, and choice always feels good. And I'd say it's the lack of choice that makes the wait-for-all-players and the teleport-to-other feel wrong.