Sheridan Sprint Week Game Jam
Cosmic Chaos
Project Summary
Co-operation & Competition
The goal of the game jam was to make a “co-opetitive” game where players work together for some kind of shared goal, but have a personal goal as well that encourages them to sometimes make decisions against their teammates.
Designing Traitorous Motives
This was the most challenging part of the project. Creating an incentive for players to not only compete against the other team, but also compete against their teammates. We iterated quite a bit on mechanics trying to dial in a sense of agency that wouldn’t detract from the over-arching goal.
Designing Psychological Factors
As our game started to take shape, we felt that just having 4 players felt alright, but it wasn’t as engaging as we were expecting. Players were able to easily keep track of who had the most points, who to target and most of the agency was kind of lost as soon as a player achieved a lead. We decided to increase the player count to 8, but most people can’t plug in 8 controllers to a computer, so we made the decision to have one player from each team share a controller with someone from the other team.
My Role on the Project
I was responsible for design of the project along with my teammates and I was also responsible for some scripting as well as UI work. One of my goals for the game was making sure that it was accessible. The game involves a lot of color, so I wanted to ensure people could understand what was happening even with visual impairments like color blindness.
This is why each player is not only noted with a color, but also a shape that is displayed on their character and zone. This allows players to understand where they are and where their goal is at a glance, and gives players who may struggle to differentiate colors view their goals and enjoy the game.