Designer’s Notes From Trinity

“It’s not a bad idea to think about two-player collaboration first, and then add one more player.” – David Culyba

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Looking back to our round 2 pitch idea, it seems to be a perfect solution to the issues we discovered in previous playtest:

Platform	Prototype #1	Round2 Pitch
VR	moving & rotating with the PC	Sit still, only move when changing scene
Mobile	Information	Action (jump, break things)
PC	movement	movement

Round 2 pitch idea solves the motion sickness for VR, and set a reasonable division of agency between PC and Mobile. It’s a collaborative platformer game.

So let’s do it to see if it works!

The Challenge of Designing 3 Player Asymmetrical Collaboration

But man, it’s so hard to come up with good design for a 3-player asymmetrical collaboration game.

It’s relatively easy to design for two player scenario, because we can design one player as the complement of the other. For example, if we are designing a collaborative platformer for two, one controls the avatar that can jump around, then the other can control the platforms.

But we are It Takes Three! What should the third player do?

From the lens of functionality, it’s natural to have two players as the complement of each other. It seems that we need to separate the functionality of one player as two players, in order to fit the “three player” collaboration game.

(Notes from November: However, should we limit our game design to functionality? It takes few more weeks for us to realize this question)

You might notice that currently, phone player’s functionality (boost jump) is separated from PC player’s functionality (movement) in such way. We don’t know if it works, all we can do is to figure it out through making it and playtesting it