Project details

Platform:                  Genre:

Engine:

Development time:

PC                      

Local multiplayer

Unreal Engine

2 weeks

Game core

My goals

Wacky, Easily read, Competitive

To build towards our design pillars the core gameplay had to be tightly knit around these which lead to these goals.

Wacky

exaggerated physics

lots happening

breakable objects

Easily read

Everyone on screen

Easy to read character direction

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Competitive

Visible score

Clear goal

Destroy for other players

Player goal

The goal of the game is to get as many plates saved during the time limit as well as making sure other players don't get more than you.

Risk/reward dilemma

This leads to a dilemma where the player will either want to play it safe and turn in their plates or continue to collect plates with the risk of being sabotaged by someone else. This leads to a more competitive game further enhancing the goal with the game core.

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Turn in plates

Player

Gather more plates

My goals

Intuitive, Fun

To further enhance the design pillars, intuitive easy controls were important while making them have a slight acceleration to ensure the player didn't have full control of the character, producing funny results.

Movement

To ensure that the player can easily understand how the movement works, the movement is based relative to the world and camera direction instead of the characters direction.

Acceleration

To make the movement more fun there was acceleration to the movement to make sure that the player would not have full control of the character at all times leading to the irony of the players ruining the restaurant while trying to save plates.

Slow start

Fast top speed

Sabotage

To further enhance the intuitive experience a designated "Attack" sabotage button was removed to instead always be a spherical hitbox in front of the character, allowing them to simply control the movement and run into players in order to sabotage them.

Sabotage hitbox

Physics design process

The initial thought when designing the system was to have the plates stack, creating big piles of plates, this would make the game more readable and visual.

While this was the ideal solution to the game, due to time restrictions I had to settle on the simpler system where the plates would rely on a magnetism between themselves and the tray the player carries them in.

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Ideal result

Plates stacking creating piles the player needs to balance

Final result

Plates, with help from magnetism pulls them towards each other creating stacks along the tray.

Sound design

The sounds I chose were taken from free sound sources and manipulated to fit the game. My main focus regarding these were to make them pleasant to listen to as well as be gratifying to the player. 

I wanted sounds with distinction to get the player grounded in what is happening in the already chaotic gameplay which is why there were lots of feedback sounds based on what the player did. 

The implementation was to play sounds based collisions through scripts.