- The game -

One player plays as a bulky fighter named Twi, the other as a small, nimble creature named Ki. Both players are to cooperate in order to navigate and fight their way through an imposing environment to reach the boss at the end! Twi has the power of movement and camera orientation. Swinging a weapon, shooting a magical projectile and doing small jumps are also part of his repertoire. His bulk makes him a bit more sturdy than Ki, so he can take a few hits and push bigger obstacles. Ki's nimbleness allows him move faster, jump higher and even perform wall jumps. Ki can turn on switches, pull levers and even bait enemies into traps to indirectly take them out. He can't take quite as many hits as Twi, but his mobility makes up for it. Just make sure not to stray away for too long, because poor Twi becomes scared and starts taking damage if he notices that Ki hasn't stood by his side for a while. 

The environment is very vertically designed, with the camera mostly looking upwards. Enemies can stand on various levels of height, some levels only reachable by Ki, who then has to indirectly eliminate them (or have Twi avoid them altogether). There are four types of bad guys: a mook who just runs towards the nearest player to smack him, a  faster one who uses different movement patterns in an attempt to get a dirty attack in, a ranger who shoots at you from a safe distance and one big, bulky boss who will give you a free ticket to the next world if you're not careful enough. Enemies aren't the only hazards in this place, though. Traps like falling boulders and a barrage of darts are waiting for you at every corner (or at least that's what the architect wanted you to think).

- Questions we asked ourselves & answers we found -

Q: Is having two players in one body really the correct way to go?

A: After going through several prototypes with that same base mechanic, it seemed like the very core of our concept was just not enjoyable to play with the small scope that we have. We were forced to go for a ground-up rework.

Q: What kind of movement is the most enjoyable / feels best?

A: Being forced to move along a path felt odd, it took away too much control from the players. Having a mix of the two (free movement in rooms with 'directed paths' in between those rooms) seemed to work, but feels too much like a "point a to point b" experience and we decided on a more explorational feeling. Having movement that is shared between two players is no longer an option, since we stepped away from the two-in-one concept. We tried then having one player orbit the other and putting full control over movement into player one's hands, but that again felt odd to control. In the end, the best experience seems to be both players moving around freely, but have player two's movement loosely restricted to player one.

Q: What kind of camera fits best?

A: We had established earlier that third-person fits best, but the exact implementation was still vague. We tried various options. Auto-aim camera felt weird, especially once players no longer share the same body. Taking control of the camera completely away from the player and just make it horizontally follow player movement felt much too static, especially since the other player might move out of the camera's view. Full camera control makes it too easy to lose sight of the second player. A mix of the two ended up best - orientation of the camera follows player one's movement and player one can use the right stick to rotate the camera inside a bounding box.

Q: Which engine works best?

A: We could get prototypes done in Unity at a reasonable pace. Unreal took way longer to make even a part of one of the Unity prototypes. Because of this massive difference in development time, Unity seemed like the smartest choice.

- What happens next? -

Now that we're done with the prototyping phase, we'll be uploading a new build here every week!