With the start of our Senior Production experience, we have set out to develop a handful of concepts, one of which will eventually develop into our production target. Each of these concepts must be fully explored and properly planned before we decide on one to set our sites on. As of this week, we have two ideas that have been our initial focus, among a set of five.

This idea is about size as a resource to manage. As a cooperative puzzle game, the two players must work together to manage and utilize their size as best as they can. Each player controls a character, one always grows when they move, the other always shrinks. They can, however, switch sizes with the press of a button.

This idea manifested while we were initially discussing possible mechanics that we hadn’t seen before in senior games. We also threw around the possibility of it being a competitive puzzler, but decided that it would work better if they players worked cooperatively.

With each player depending on the other to provide them with the resource they need, their size, it will foster companionship and agreement between the two players. They will rely on one another to progress and will find that if they try to go it alone, they are either too small to handle the challenges or two big to achieve the finesse they need.

Our second idea is about a team of players, we are unsure of the exact size, but are thinking around 5, cooperatively controlling a space ship. One player would act as the helmsman, and captain, which each other player would assume command of a turret on the hull of the ship. They would be tasked with completing certain objectives, while fending off AI controlled enemies and environmental hazards, such as asteroids and solar flares.

This idea developed from both Mitchel and my interest in space games and Mark’s interest in imagining and modeling ships. The core of the game, a cooperative experience of controlling a space ship, also manifested from an interest in games like Artemis, while questioning their lack of real action, as they are much more often based on bridge stations, rather than players taking a direct role in the action.

One of the things I like most about this concept is how open it is to change, as the core aspect of the game is just the idea of cooperatively controlling something, in whatever form that may take.