Let's talk about the game we're making!
After more than a couple of months of game production, we finally managed to sit down and nail an absolute title of the game:
As far as genre goes, it's a side-scrolling puzzle/platform co-op game for 1 to 3 players. We're putting an emphasis on the co-op part; each character, either all controlled by one player, or one player per character or something in between, is given unique abilities and a set of features that work well with the others. Our goal is that the players will be using all the characters abilities in a complement to each other. This is something we've been missing in earlier co-op-enabled games, so why not make our own?
As mentioned earlier, Darkoli can be described as a "side-scrolling puzzle/platform co-op game". Let's split that into smaller parts, to explain what we're actually doing :)
Firstly, a side-scroller means that the gameplay occurs on the x-axis and y-axis, most often but actually not necessarily from the left and right. Probably the most well known example of this would be the original Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System/ Famicom.
Then, we said Darkoli is a puzzle/platform game. To our knowledge, that could mean at least a gazillion of variants and combinations. To us involved in this project, it means that the actions the player carries out is centered around either moving, jumping and falling down into spiky pits, but mainly solving puzzles in the levels, such as figuring out how to lower a drawbridge to cross previously mentioned spiky pit.
Lastly, the co-op part means that there are "co-operation" involved. With 1 to 3 players playing at any given time, this means that the co-op elements occur between players as they interact and cooperate with each other to play the game.
As far as the co-op goes, there's lots of games that claim they have "CO-OP INCLUDED!". We actually became quite sceptic to a lot of the games we tested prior to defining our game. For example, we were testing the game Trine on the PC. The co-operative elements of that game was quite inspiring, but they fell short on one (according to us) major flaw: Adding additional players really messed up the game and actually made it harder! As the characters had "unique abilities", they were good at different things. This was a great thought, but we figured out some of the things that didn't work well when playing Trine in multiplayer:
- The abilities that the characters possessed scaled differently as the platforming elements of the levels increased. In the end, one player had to wait for the other (2) players constantly.
We think this was mostly thanks to the fact that especially "the Theif", but also "the Magician" had lots of ways of traversing obstacles, but "the Knight" did not. Actually, if you boil it down there is really nothing unique or essential that only "the Knight" can do. "The Theif" even became a better fighter than "the Knight" at the end of the game.
With this in mind, we've put a lot of thought on how the characters should compliment each other and how their actions should affect the other players. Also, as the style of gameplay changes as difficulty increases and the game progresses, the abilities cannot and/or shouldn't be tied to something that all characters need to perform, e.g. platforming or "killing monsters". Either that, or keep the amount of challenge for each type of character to a parallel increasing curve. We think we're on the right track here, but if you feel that you can shed some light or help us out, be sure to give us a shout!