Parallel Development

The next game I'm planning on working on is going to be a bit weird. I thought I'd sling it past the game design thread to get some opinions.

I was already playing around with this idea back in the 4.x version of Unity. But some of the changes made in Unity 5 are going to make it that much easier to implement.

I'm planning on making a game consisting of two different deployments. One of the deployments will be targeted at laptops, set-top boxes, smart-tvs, and will function as a server for the game. The other deployment will be targeted at smartphones and tablets, and will serve as a thin client that collects player input and returns visual and audio feedback unique to each user. It will be a local-multiplayer game that runs over local wifi, and is controlled using mobile devices.

One of the designs I was initially planning on working on was a sort of bomberman in the dark crossed with a first-person RPG control system. The television would display an overhead map of a darkened dungeon represented as a grid of rooms. The players would be able to see the room they are currently in on their mobile devices. Lighting a torch in the room you're in would cause that room to be visible on the big-screen. Keeping your location secret from the other players would be part of the core gameplay.

 

Do you envision this as a party game, where a group of players are sitting around a shared screen but doing their sneaky stuff on their own mobile devices? If so, that sounds fun!

Can you post any design sketches? I think it might generate a lot of feedback.

 

Yes, that's exactly the kind of game I was thinking of! I also had another idea for a murder-mystery style variation similar to Clue, where the players search through a mansion for clues to figure out which of them is the killer.

Sadly, I'm at work at the moment, and won't be able to post any design sketches until tomorrow. I'll see what I can do though. I should have some time tomorrow to get something up.

This approach to developing a local multiplayer experience has a lot of potential. At the same time, it can be quite costly in terms of effort. You have to effectively design and build two different applications for two different interfaces. Unity 5 makes things a little easier with some of the features it added. The latest build manager has a bundling feature, that makes it much easier to package up different versions of the same project. So you can work on two different targeted versions of an application from within the same project.

 

I like the Clue idea, too! There aren't enough party games. The Clue one especially sounds like it would have good mass appeal, albeit for the limited audience that plays couch games.

 

This was actually the reason why I became interested in a different approach to local multiplayer development.

I've always felt that some of my best gaming experiences have come from local multiplayer. Games, no matter their nature, are more fun when enjoyed with your friends. And while on-line gaming can let you reach out and play, getting everyone together has just always been the optimal experience for me.

Personally, I don't think the audience for playing couch multi-player games is limited. I think it's a lot bigger than most people realize. The problem that I saw was that there is a significant barrier to entry for this kind of experience. A lot of it is tied to hardware.

For starters, you need a device that is connected to the television. This isn't a huge issue for a lot of people, but it is still an issue. I was hoping to target Smart-TVs with low-graphics-requirement games, so as to circumvent even this barrier.

Perhaps more significant is the need for multiple controllers. There are tons of fun games that can support up to 4 players, but purchasing 4 modern game controllers is a fairly daunting proposition. And game controllers can be an awkward item to carry around with you. This problem is compounded by the number of devices that can be connected to a TV. If you have a Wii U and a PS3, do you buy enough controllers to support 4-players for both of them? What if you have even more consoles? The expense can be catastrophic, and well out of the range of more casual players.

And then there's screen space. Even with today's titanic televisions, split-screen severely limits how much of the screen can be used, and is inherently confusing for many players by its very nature.

Last but not least, there's the hard 4-player limit. If you manage to get a crowd of friends together, what happens when there aren't enough spots for everyone? Do the other people just have to watch? It always feels like you are excluding a part of the group when this happens. It would be so much better to be able to design local multi-player games that can handle a larger number of people at the same time.

This parallel development idea was the solution I came up with. Instead of focusing on acquiring a large amount of custom hardware, it is focused on using hardware that a lot of people already own. Instead of forcing the user to buy multiple controllers, it uses the mobile devices that a large number of people carry with them anyway. Most people add wi-fi to their home as a given these days, and with the current cost of wi-fi routers, it makes sense. And the server software could be run on just about anything, from a laptop, to the TV itself in the case of newer Smart-TVs.

It isn't appropriate for all game types. There are plenty of action-oriented games that wouldn't work well with it. But action games aren't necessarily the best local multi-player games for larger groups of friends anyhow. Often a more laid-back or turn-based approach to game design works better in these scenarios. And genres that appeal to broader demographics are more likely to appeal to a larger party of friends. I was thinking more along the lines of digital board-games than multi-player shooters.

 

That's a brilliant idea! Unity's the perfect development environment, too, since it easily deploys to so many platforms.

 

This. It's a neat idea for a hobby project to play with friends. As an actual product that you'd want to one day ship to the public, it is rife with risks. The first of which is that this approach is very RARE, which makes it novel and also means that players won't understand the concept. They won't know what to expect, and will have to be taught what your game means, and then convinced to overcome a LOT of technical hurdles just to experience it. It's expensive to develop and marketing would be 10x worse. It also requires multiple devices to play.

All that said, I still think it's a neat challenge as an experiment in game design .

Gigi

 

Making it perfect as an indie project!

 

You are not wrong, sir. I consider myself more of a hobbyist, and definitely don't rely on game development for my livelihood, which is why I am considering this for my next project. It is a bit dicey, and you would definitely not want to put too much expense into a project like this without having first tested the concept in the open market.

At the same time, an approach such as this also has a considerable amount of potential. And a lot of the technical hurdles can be mitigated. As long as you are targeting lower-performing mobile devices with the graphics, the potential reach is quite broad. A good way to get around the potential headaches of a monetization model would be to charge for the server application, and distribute the mobile app for free. That would make it easier to join in, and help spread word-of-mouth from play sessions. You could even display a QR code for downloading the mobile app on the "waiting-for-players" screen of the server app.

Acquiring a whole bunch of mobile devices would be horribly expensive. Having everyone in the room just pop out their own smartphones and start playing is quite another proposition. This model would be a great way to target groups of adults, as opposed to children or teens.

There's any number of ways that you could play around with and adjust this model, for a broad number of different game types. Every time I revisit the concept, I come up with new thoughts on how to improve. I even threw together a quick prototype in Unity 4.x where you start a local server, broadcast that server's presence over the wi-fi, and then connect to it using a mobile app. I even created interactive elements present on the server that I controlled with buttons on the mobile app. Worked like a charm. And now with Unity 5.0, all of the technical features necessary to make that scenario happen are present in the personal version of the engine.

 

Fibbage for the Playstation 4 is very similar to this, where the PS4 is where you would put the laptop.

http://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/fibbage-the-hilarious-bluffing-party-game-ps4/

 

An excellent example of the concept in practice in a commercial space. JellyVision also applied something similar to one of their more recent versions of You Don't Know Jack, where they allowed the player to use an accompanying mobile app as a controller for the game.

 

Sorry, I haven't had time recently to further flesh this out with concept sketches yet. The day job is quite busy, no free time there at all, and a lot of my after hours are eaten up with family matters and other projects. I'll try to hash something out come Saturday.

 

This is why SMALL is powerful. Even if it's game development is your living, time is a bigger enemy than skill or creativity.

Gigi

 

That's one of the reasons why this project strikes me as a great idea. Apart from having to implement input support for multiple devices (iOS and Android), the game itself is scoped very small.

 

Actually, I feel the current approach I'm taking is scoped TOO large. It might be a better idea for me to start off with something even smaller. I'm thinking a scaled-down version of Stratego would be a better initial proof-of-concept.

 

You made my day! Kudos for having the courage to set aside the effort you've invested thus far (aka sunk costs) to see what you can learn attempting something smaller. I wish you luck. When you have a working prototype, be sure to post it in Feedback Friday.

In moments like this, the world seems in just the tiniest way, a little bit of a happier place.

Gigi <-- is a dork.

 

^ is a dork.

 

I'm pulling this thread out of moth-balls and dusting it off. As I near completing work on my lip-sync plug-in upgrade, I start to look to my next project. And while I would love to use my new plug-in to make some cartoons, I'm thinking I'll go ahead and take a little break to work on an actual game.

I'm thinking a game that is half Stratego, half chess, where the identity of the pieces is extremely significant to the gameplay. Keeping the pieces hidden from the other player will be a major part of the gameplay, as well as trying to test the other player to discover the identity of their pieces.

The only real drawback to a game like this would be that the third screen would be somewhat unnecessary. All of the really significant feedback would be on the two mobile screens being used to play the game. But then, having a third screen to display information known to both players would significantly increase the spectator value of the game.

 

What's the significance of three screens?
Gigi

 

The main screen displays information available to all players. The mobile screens that you are playing the game with display information unique to each individual player.

In Stratego, the identity of each piece is known only to the individual players. Part of the strategy is trying to navigate through the unknown. This kind of design can't be handled by a single-screen game. Split-screen allows for information to be available to all players. It's where you get "screen-looking" in FPS games. Both players in Stratego can see the board, so the board and the position of the pieces could safely be displayed on the third screen. On each mobile screen the players would be able to see their own pieces and their identities, but not the identity of their opponent's pieces.

In a two-player game, the third screen becomes less significant. With more than two players, its importance increases. It would be really cool to have a version of this kind of game built into a table, but that would require dedicated hardware, and a TV-oriented screen would serve just as well.

 

The concept sounds similar to me to what Nintendo is trying to do with some games using the WiiU & what I suspect Microsoft were hoping people would do with the windows phone/tablet & Xbox games. Having no skill in this area (but like many people I have an idea for something similar in a file somewhere) maybe it would be easier to start with a simple 2 player platformer to work out the control kinks first?

Something like this would also lend itself well to a d&d style game where everyone could play on the main screen & the dm uses the mobile device to do all the DM stuff like placing traps, monsters (& I think there may already be a game out or in development doing this kind of thing. Curse my ageing memory)

 

D&D style could be fun. It's expanding the scope again. But the players get smartphones. The DM gets a lap top, and everyone watches the action play out on the big screen.

 

yeah, it would let people be sneaky in their party (e.g. pick pocket an ally, 'accidentally' hit an ally instead of the enemy), especially if they made a successful roll so that they weren't detected & therefore it didn't display on the main screen. The arguments would be fun, a bit like those how to host a murder games where you try not to give anything away.

 

This idea seems really intriguing, I think the technical aspect of it is part of the allure. I envision people in a dungeon for some reason, since you said it would be very dark. Perhaps one player plays a monster while the other is trying to flee and certain actions will give the player an idea of where you are. Imagine the game concept of Slender, where Slender is one player and the victim is the other, and finding the notes sets off a ping. It's basically feeling your way in the dark until you make visual contact. Then it's just a chase. That would be pretty fun.

 

An action game probably wouldn't be as easy to implement as a first-run, even a simple one. I like the idea of scaling down to a 2-player game for an initial attempt, that's solid. But action games require real-time updating, which is more difficult to implement. I was planning on starting off with turn-based games initially. That style of game is much easier to handle in a networked environment.

 

There's an Xcom board game that uses an app to do all the alien moves etc so all the players play on the board & input the actions into the app which then calculates responses, updates alien positions without telling the player (unless the player then spots them or is attacked) etc. might be a way to paper prototype it using something similar?