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OVERVIEW

Plague Party

A co-op, 3 person multiplayer game about a team of plague doctors

Roles and Responsibilities

 

For this Jam, I worked as the lead Game Designer, created UI/UX design wireframes, and created and recorded content for the Sound Design.

Timeline

 

October (4th to 6th) 2019, in one weekend, 48 hours

Team

 

Lars Roberson - 3D Art & Animation
Christon Tan - 2D Art, Music, & UI/UX art
Maxwell Martin - Game Design, UI/UX Design, & Sound Design
Daniel McBride - Programming & Implementation

About Chillenium

 

 

Chillennium is a yearly Student Game Jam hosted by the Department of Visualization at Texas A&M University. Chillennium is the largest student-run game jam in the world and is open to students worldwide

Tools

 

Unity, Audacity, Clip Studio Paint/Paint Tool Sai, Maya, Substance Painter

THEME: All for One and One for All

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About Plague Party

Plague Party is a couch co-op multiplayer game in which a team of plague doctors (Chuck, Charles, & Chalupa) must cure the plagued peasants coming out of the well and flip them over the gate to safety.

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This game was made in 48 hours during the 2019 Chillennium Game Jam. We had two bugs in our final submission.
1. The infected would sometime spawn and get stuck in the middle, only to be de-spawned before the next infected came out of the well.
2. Sometimes the infected would not reach the gates and start drifting from one side to the other.
These bugs were fixed shortly after and have been excluded from our gameplay video.

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Unfortunately our game was never judged due to a technical issue on behalf of the staff. They did their best to fix it after the fact, but we were happy to at least make a great game.

POST MORTEM

Designing for the User

Judges only have a short amount of time to view and play a game; thus, it was decided that creating a Mario Party esq. mini game would be the smart approach given the simplicity and fun within time constraints.

 

In order to make it as user-friendly as possible, I designed many visual que's that would help the player know when they should attack. The characters and abilities were color coded, and the zombie would change to the color of the player who was supposed to hit it. Also when the player could not attack, from being grabbed, Their banner in the upper left changed colors and showed a cancel symbol over their weapon.
 

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Designing for Play-style

To make the enemies more engaging than moving in a straight path to the outer wall, I designed a sine wave that the enemy would move on, to help make their movements more sporadic.

 

To add more depth, I also prevented the players from being able to cross one another on their locked circle path, which in return helped cement the one for all all for one theme of the jam. This also made players communicate with one another to successfully line up their attacks with the enemy, which added to party mini games purpose. 

CONTRIBUTIONS

Design Takeaways

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  • Some people questioned if our game fit the theme, so in the future I need to make sure first and foremost it does so clearly.

  • I didn't need to add complexity to the game; When making the zombies move in a sine wave I created more issues than what we got out of it.

  • When I was designing the game, I made sure the players couldn't move past each other and if the player was stuck another player had to free you hoping to add mechanics to make them players interact with one another, but in the end it felt like just having these small two mechanics were not enough interaction for the party game genre.
     

Programming Takeaways​

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  • At the jam I had to learn a lot of new functions in engine that I was not familiar with in the past, so in the future I should focus designing around what I do know

  • A simple thing I used for the first time in engine was particle systems, which turned out to be very easy to use and added a nice amount of polish other games didn't have

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Sound Design Takeaways

 

  • This is the first time I did some sound design in a project, and while I was recording I met many others that were into just sound and they gave me insightful advice that sound could be made out of anything

 

Project Takeaways

 

  • Overall working in the small group of 4 we had, I felt like working directly with the artist and programmer by my side we were able to implement and design together when going about the project,

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