Chained - a project of 5 students from the university of applied sciences hamburg.

Hello,
I really would like to show you our project for our "games master degree" studies. We are 5 students (2 coder, 3 designer) and working for about 3 month on this project. We use Unity Pro and really love it.

What is chained

Chained is a pure two player action adventure where two prisoners, bound together by an energy chain, have to escape from a sci fi, subterranean labor camp, by fighting enemy robots and solving puzzles.The central focus of Chained is symbiosis, which is embodied by the two player characters: They are intellectually and physically very different, but depend on and perfectly complement each other. The players are forced to work together, which is how the term cooperation derives from symbiosis. With this as a background, Chained is about fighting and solving puzzles.

Fighting in the context of symbiosis means, that the two characters can only together fight successfully. They share their only weapon, the energy chain between them, and can do combo attacks together. The symbiotic aspect of the puzzles is, that they can only be solved by a team.

Chained is going to be played by two players in front of one XBox to underline the cooperation aspect of the game, which can this way be transferred to the players. Only by sitting next to each other, the players are able to achieve the direct and intuitive interaction necessary to succeed in Chained. For this compelling experience, we coined the term "couch coop".

Over time, the players will get access to new exciting chain modes, 5 altogether, each with special capabilities. Those modes aren’t only fun to use, but enable the players to kill their growing stronger enemies more efficiently and solve previously impossible puzzles. The players arch enemy is an all controlling computer system, directing the robots and trying to conceal the true purpose of their prison. In the end, our two heros need to defeat the system on their last step towards freedom.

Chained offers two friends the unique opportunity to go through an exciting adventure together and experience how two completely different characters can, brought together, become something far bigger than the sum of both, by uniting their skills and achieve the impossible.

Get in touch

We would really appreciate some feedback and attention from all over the world. If you are interested in Chained and want to get more information, please check out our Facebook page or www.facebook.com/ChainedGame, our twitter feed @ChainedGame or simply drop us a line via mail: info@chainedgame.de.

Thanks for reading!

 

Interesting... but limitting it to only 'couch coop' is gona limit yr audience a lot.
Games like this would play great in online coop with voip (ventrilo,steamchat,...)

I realize that adding online coop is adding a lot of extra work/troubles but i really think its worth it for these kinda games.

Anyway, i love how it looks, reminds me on alienswarm (the original UT2004 mod) , i would buy this if it was a online coop game for pc.

Anyway, good luck with this game !

 

Hey Roidz, thanks for your feedback.
We know about the potential of an online mode, but as far as this is a students project wich have to be in a decent state around end of june, we decided to leave this part untouched and reconsider it, when we are going to take Chained to a more serious level.

Hello again everyone, today I want to share a gameplay video with you. We hope you like it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFQ105Dzv78

 

not bad! I hope to see the hamburger implementation soon!

 

I like this concept. Very unique style of gameplay. Can't wait to see how this project evolves!

 

Thx for your positive feedback.
We'll try to keep you tuned!

 

Our graphics designer Moritz has some fun with our new ragdolls for the dead bodys of our characters.

 

Nice two-player concept. Novel idea as far as I'm aware. wtg!

 

Hello,
two months has passed and we did some work, which I want to show you. First of all we want to show you some renders of our enemies, because there has to be something to cut-through right?

ShockDrone
ParaDrone
The Watcher

Sorry for the links, uploader didn't work for me today.

 

Wow, those are some great looking models!

 

Hey,
we finally finished our project Chained for our Games Master Studies at HAW Hamburg, Germany.

Here is a final Gameplay Video for you: (They are talking German. No subtitles available.)

And I did write a postmortem, if you want to read more about our development.
http://www.danielkiedrowski.com/2012/07/chained-postmortem/

Have an nice day.

 

Cool clean looking game. I think there is a market for couch Co-Op that goes largely untapped. If you added some extra Mario partyish modes and attachment/unlocks etc, it could become a popular game to play at social gatherings. But that may be too far outside your game mechanics, IDK.