How to handle lives in a co-op arcade-style game?

My younger son is making a 4-player co-op version of Scramble. All four ships will basically be flying along blasting things together. He's got the basic mechanics working and will be adding players 2-4 soon, which raises a design question:

How should he handle lives in a game like this?

Traditional coop arcade games, of course, tracked lives separately for each player, because each one cost about 1/3 of a quarter. You could keep playing as long as you had money, and if you ran out of money before your buddies, well, maybe they're nice enough to lend you a quarter.

But even though this will be going in an arcade cabinet, there will be no quarters involved in play. But if we don't have lives, it will rather defeat the challenge. But I hate elimination mechanics, where one player (usually the weakest, which in our case will mean the school chum who has finally come over for a visit and has never played the game before) gets knocked out and has to just watch while the more experienced players continue to have fun.

So, I was thinking maybe the lives should be pooled. If there are 3 players, then you start with 9 lives, and whenever anybody dies, that counter goes down. When all 9 lives are gone, it's game over for everyone. (Whether we allow them to mash a "continue" button at this point is still up in the air.)

I've never seen such a shared-lives mechanic, though. What do y'all think?

 

You've never seen Golden axe????? Oh my god... That's what I think They had mixed mechanic: each credit is 3 lives. Credits are shared between players. Lives are per-player. To get lives player fills some gauge or does something many times or it's those thieves sometimes were dropping lives... Maybe it was just different in different parts of golden axe(1/2/3) so I'm confused about that. Don't remember. It was so long ago. You lose all lives - you can use (or not use and watch) a credit.

It was game you could play for hours in coop. I remember getting to last stage was an epic success, but I've never even reached last boss in the end.

EDIT: I think Batman Forever (another DOS/Genesis generation game) had something similar.

 

Oh yeah, Golden Axe is one of our favorites. But, as you say, the lives are per-player. Interesting point though that the credit pool is shared.

I'm not sure how to make that work without actual coins, though. I mean, yeah, you can just mash a "credits" button and it works... but it's not as interesting as when you have a limited supply.

 

Newer marios merely penalize the death by suspending the player in a bubble that the living player has to pop to bring them back. If both die, then both die and that's loss of lives / game over.

This is by far the best modern mechanic for co op lives: so long as one is alive, they can resurrect the other. You want to do this because its more fun playing with each other. It's not a quarters arcade cabinet designed to keep people spending, it's supposed to be fun & fun means playing with a living friend.

Left4Dead shows that a resurrection mechanic isn't exclusive.

 

I've never played it with coins. Get dos version and play. There you have limited supply that can be set in options(no unlimited for you ). I'd say coins would ruin whole fun of it being quite hardcore. Even on maximum amount of credits available there it was still hard and I think that's one of main reasons me and my friends lost hundreds of hours in it. If we'd pass if completely, it wouldn't feel anywhere that good.

 

I like that! Thanks for pointing it out.

 

have the pool of lives & each player has a meter that fills, maybe with each successful attack or something, & when it fills it contributes a life to the pool & then resets the meter. That way new players can use the pool of lives that the more experienced players are filling up quicker than the newer player does, but the newer player is still contributing in their own small way to that pool of lives. If a player dies & there are no lives in the pool then they are out of the game & the lives meters are turned off so it is a last ditch effort to see how far the remaining players can get before they each die. If the game difficulty starts scaled to the number of players & then doesn't reset as each dies & drops out i.e. if 4 start then the difficulty level remains set for 4 players right to the end, the game will taper off quickly as people drop out. This way, unless the remaining players are really really good, each player that dies doesn't end up waiting very long before the game ends.

Then at the end of the game show how many lives each player used & how many they contributed to the pool. You could even have a score bonus/penalty if you wanted, though it would be interesting to see how people played if they got a bonus for each life contributed to the pool & each life used from the pool.

 

Halo coop does this pretty well too. As long as one player is alive the game continues. The player must be 'safe' before their ally can respawn. Either by killing all of the enemies or retreating.

 

Yeah, that works well with a level-based game, but given Scramble's continuous-onslaught-of-danger structure, I'm not sure I see how to apply that one.

But I can see having dead players respawn in some sort of protective bubble, which you have to crack open for them.

 

A little break in-between of fights during which other players respawn. After a wave or after a boss or such. Several seconds of rest won't hurt players either.

 

BroForce handles this similarly. Prisoner cages are sprinkled liberally through the level. Players can bust them open. If everyone's alive, the player gains health. If a player is dead, that player respawns out of the cage. Your son could use a similar concept, perhaps with an alien ship holding the "dead" player in a tractor beam or something like that.

 

You could have something like a scrap mechanic, every ship you kill (or whatever) gives you "scrap". Then when you die it costs some of the scrap to revive yourself (taking down the pool of leftover scrap). Now every time you die it costs more "scrap" to revive yourself.

So say death 1 costs 100, death 2 costs 200, death 4 costs 400, death 5 800. Well maybe you dont have enough to revive his 5 death, but the good players still got 500 scrap and havent died yet

 

From left field: If you are going to put it in a cabinet why not stick a coin slot/token slot on it, it will be fun to build, and gives you back the excitement of limited coins.

 

Nice idea!

 

& each time you generate 3 extra lives it drops a coin out the refund slot instead of just giving the lives to you. Like a really weird poker machine that pays out really slowly & only pays based on skill