Splitscreen - Handling the UI and screen ergonomy.

This is something I have faced quite a bit in the recent years.

Be it Local Coop or local PvP, it has its unique lots of complexity when it comes to handling its UI.
Basically, whatever option you got for 1 player is usually shared or available for every other players in one way or the other.

There are many layers to it too.
Such as :
• Controls' sources.
Should each player have some controls over some or all the menus or should they have their own separate menus? How should the control appears if each has its own "cursor"?

• Menus & their content.
Let's say you got a bit of customization for each players or many. How are you handling the general way of displaying the menus.

• Who owns what?
This is the most complex part I have faced. I don't mean it like it's hard to script or anything like that... Simply that I had to tackle my brain quite a lot to overcome this kind of though whenever I work on a project that has some kind of splitscreen. It affects everything in a game since the way an inventory is done internally is based on what is available and to whom. A shared inventory or a separate inventory? If it's separated, how does we set who gets what when there's a reward? A roll of dice or leaving the fate to the goodwill of either of the player who might end up fighting among themselves for a simple bit of data? If you don't believe this as a possibility, you haven't been in my shoes when I was younger. I got friends (2 brothers) who were really punching and kicking each other because each wanted an Legendary item that dropped in Diablo 2 for their own separate character... and that game isn't even splitscreen! The same thing happened with Ultima Online and some other games we were playing back in the days.

Some game, instead, allow each player to use the same items... but then this bring the creative limit where both player will be almost identical if the item they have are powerful in face of the remaining items available.

This, then, bring the concept of having pre-made item with no "randomness" just to control the balance of the game equipment system... just because of the line of though I just covered.

• How is the game "split"?
This is, again, something that has many possibility. Is the game split horizontally or vertically? In both ways, each player only see half of what they should be seeing when they play alone. Maybe it's not split but truly shared (like a fighting game or Bird-view 3rd person game like Diablo or a platformer) where the position of the player controls the camera's distance to the action?

I would like to hear about how you would tackle this kind of conceptual difficulty?
What kind of difficulty are you seeing with Splitscreen gameplay?

Anything else about Splitscreen and its conceptual nature?

 

In some design aspects, split screen is easier than shared screen because each player has a separate screen for their own menus.

Not to derail the thread before it even gets going, but I've been curious about ways to handle NPC dialogue in shared screen local co-op. Does the person who interacted with the NPC get to converse while the game is paused? Or while the other players can continue moving? Or do all the players get to vote on the party response?

Regarding item/skill balance, what if players are rewarded for diversity? So a warrior and a wizard would be more powerful than two warriors or two wizards.

 

I don't know that this is specific to shared screen, but are you aware of how TOR does it? In that game, coop players all "vote" on the dialog taken, and one of the votes is randomly chosen. In this case I don't think the game "recognizes" multiple player characters in dialog, which is also an important part of the game design.

Divinity Original Sin does, though: you play as two characters at once, and the player (or two players, if both are playing coop) chooses their dialog. A nice feature for single-player games, if you didn't want to play both simultaneously, was to give one of the characters a certain personality, which would define their dialog. And it was always interesting when there was a conversation "persuasion" moment between the two PCs, with the victor determining some course of action. It always felt a little shameful to "lose" to your computer-controlled PC...

Apologies for further derailment.