final project early phase presentation
Original idea
- Users each control a blob
- Blobs can interact with each other
- Playstation Home, but with blobs
New Idea
- Collaborative platformer
- Blob has to get from point A to point B
- 2 player game
- Person 1 is blob
- Person 2 controls the level
- P2 controls levers, ramps, mechanics of level
- Goal is to help p1 pass the level
- How does p2 help p1 without communicating directly?
What’s been done
- Box2d up & running
- Blob mechanics
- Basic level design
- Keyboard control of blob
Hurdles
•Collaboration
- 2 people go to website and register (php)
- Create websocket server (python), each player communicates via web browser (chrome) and websockets
•Maintaining state via websockets
- P1 (blob player) is master, maintains overall state
- P2 is slave
- P2 (level player) sends level state changes to P1
- P1 sends blob position/velocity updates to P2
- Any other ideas on how to do this?
Comments from the crit 4/20:
I think collision should be how you help each other. It’d be cool if it was impossible to get through the level as an individual blob. Maybe you need to push your friends blob, or have some mutual gravitational effect on each other to get through the level.
Wow, this seems like a bit of work for the next week … ah ok, seems like you have the basics already working.
Just watch out for websockets. It works in Firefox 4, but there is no accepted standard for websockets yet. They just made up their own implementation.
2 player on 1 keyboard … ? start small so you have something working for now … then add fancy networking stuff … dont assume the game mechanics side will be easier to make, you could easiy spend all of your time building the socket backend and end up with a non working game.
“Controlling the level” is no easy task, aside from managing it technically, you need a really good way to mechanically do it as well. It needs to be fun for player 2 as well (and just flipping switches isn’t particularly fun). It seems like player 2 will just be waiting for player 1 to get onto or near an object, at which point they click it.
hey blob tease, show the demo! the blob looks fun! yeah the one keyboard as a backup is fun. That would also work better for DEMO DAY where people would love to play this 2-player live.
I would be kind of annoyed if I was just the lever person. the blob looks like way more fun.
Looks a little strange that you can jump pretty fast (go up quickly) but then gravity is like nothing.
–>
why does the blob fall down so slowly…
Reminds me of the game that Tim Sherman is developing for Magrathea — where one person controls the terrain, and the other person is navigating around the terrain.
It seems like these blobs behave like tanks. What if you went all the way and made them look like bouncy tanks.
Will player 2 be visible in the game at all? Maybe as a little sidekick or something?
show me pictures! Amen!
So it’s a collaborative puzzle game using blobbies as characters? Make sure to heavily research exisiting puzzle games, in order to come up with puzzles that are challenging and original. They’re so popular & heavily done, that you really need to be familiar with the exisiting material to do anything interesting.
Paul Miller recommends the game “Gish”
A collaborative game where the components of the puzzel are controlled by different users is a cool idea, just hope that you can get people online and in such a way they understand what is going on.
Dan sez: make a two-person game that works on a single computer, as a fallback case.